by Liam Durcan
When he opened the door to the patio, she jerked her head and reflexively pulled the joint away, cupping it in the hand farthest away from him. A reflex, one he’d seen in his own kids, triggered by sudden parental appearance.
“Do you mind if I hang out here?”
“No. No. It’s just you, right?”
“He’s asleep.”
She craned her neck, seeking the verification of the empty patio door behind him.
“Has he been paranoid like this?”
“This? This is good day for him. You should have seen him when he went in to confront people at work.” Norah was nodding slowly, as though lapping up something whose taste she was already familiar with. “It didn’t go well.”
“Susan told me. The whole buyout thing was a major shit storm at the firm. Lots of lawyers. My dad didn’t go easily.”
“I only saw the lawyers’ letters. Of course, he doesn’t remember agreeing to the buyout. I had to explain everything to him when I went through his mail, and he didn’t deal with it any better the second time around.”
“Susan said that it was a number of things—there were problems with the consulate project and he was taking the blame for that. He was—what’s the polite word? Uncompromising. And I think there were other disagreements. Business stuff. This was a business decision, Susan told me.”
“She stayed.”
“She did,” Norah said.
Brendan walked up to the edge of the patio, putting both hands on the railing. He tried to look past the modest haze of the patio lights to where the night’s blackness hung heavily.
“He doesn’t mean a lot of what he says.”
When he turned around, he found Norah just looking at him. “Did my mom ask you to say that?”
“No.”
“He gets me uptight.”
“He’s good at it.”
He caught himself looking at her hand, watching a single line of smoke rise and then twin before dissolving from signal to noise. His attention was obvious even to her.
“You want some?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” Brendan said, waving her off, one swipe of a gesture vigorous enough to disperse the smoke, whose smell he already recognized was calling out to him in a deep, neurochemical way. “I’m fine. I go to AA for some issues I had,” he continued, to which Norah stubbed out the joint.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s good now. I’m good.”
“Was it booze?” she asked, surprised.
“Uh, everything, really. Booze, pot, pills. You name it. In the end, it’s always about behavior anyway.”
“Was it because of Vietnam?”
“No. I don’t think so. Did your father tell you that?”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t talk much about before. I just knew you’d been there.”
“It wasn’t the war. I had some problems over the last couple of years.”
Norah looked at him in that way that made him want to tell her more, an urge he was relieved he could control.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“Sure.” Brendan lifted his leg over one of the lounge chairs, straddling it for an uncomfortable moment before sitting down. “He’s messed up after this accident.”
“I can tell.”
“He’s lost everything and he’s blaming.”
“My father has his limitations, you know. He had them before the accident.”
“It’s just that everything has been taken away from him.”
“Well, you’re here. Susan’s around. I’m around.”
“He needs something more than us.”
“That, in a sentence, is my father’s problem.”
“I know, I know, but I think he’d really benefit from a gesture, you know, something to help him get back his confidence.”
“I don’t know if confidence is the problem.”
“I think he’s afraid. Look, I hope you don’t think I reduce everything to animal behavior, but this is fear aggression. All I’m saying is that if we help him feel that confidence about his life, it could help. . . .”
“You mean like helping him to get his license back?’
Brendan shook his head. “No, I think that’s impossible. But I was thinking about this house. He built it. In a way, it’s a statement, personally and professionally. He needed to come back here, I think, for a reason.” Norah nodded, looking like she’d regretted prematurely darkening the ashtray. “I thought that you could offer to do a short film about him and this house.” He lifted his hands as if to acknowledge the wary look she deployed. “No. Hear me out.”
She was shaking her head, “It’s self-serving, Brendan. And maudlin. God, he’d never agree.”
“I think he would. I’m not asking you to turn this into a project, but the process would be important to him. It’s a way you could relate to each other differently—you know, as professionals. And it would take his mind off . . . well, everything.”
Norah was silent. He imagined her trying in vain to muster the counterargument, how the pros and cons would resist being weighed in the soft chemical buzz and the cricket song and the lakeside darkness. How it would be just a well-meaning request from a smiling long-lost uncle. And as Brendan waited for her answer, he tried not to feel shame, but he was glad it was dark on the patio and that the details of their conversation, beyond what he could get her to agree to, would likely be forgotten.
Chapter 13
The sound of Norah’s voice on the other side of his bedroom door surprised Martin. It was late, and for a moment he wasn’t even certain that he had heard her, but then she repeated herself. Norah’s voice behind the door. Soft and so unusual. Susan, well, that would have been a different story; she would have been banging on the door like a cop with a warrant, eager to rejoin whatever argument had been left unresolved. But Norah was different; a girl who retreated into silences that had often made him regret what he’d thought was a harmless tone of voice or particular choice of word. Sharon was the one who understood this truth about their younger daughter, who would invariably coax Norah into explaining the reason for her upset with her father and then prompt him with the apology. When she explained that she wanted to make a short film about him, he was uncertain what she meant. He thought at first that she wanted to make the film about his recovery, and his first impulse was to say no, shuddering at the thought of that difficult trajectory back to the Dunes and the abyss that had preceded it. She pulled a chair up to his bed, and for a moment she looked at the model of Melnikov’s pavilion, which sat on the nearby desk, and he could not help but see this as a gesture to get him to acquiesce, to agree in some fundamental way to be just another subject.
But she explained that she wanted to make a film about the lake house. It was, she said, his most important work, his most personal, and she wanted use it as a starting point: to walk around with him, ask a few questions about how he’d started his career and what he thought about architecture now. Now. Now that he wasn’t able to practice anymore. She wanted to film this, she said. It caught him by surprise, for he could not remember her ever having taken such an interest in his opinions. It would only require him to spend an afternoon filming, Norah said, leaning in as she spoke to him. He tried to focus on her.
“Why are you interested in this?”
“I suppose I’ve never asked you,” she replied.
No ulterior motive. A disinterested observer. He hadn’t considered her in this way, considered her curiosity. She had always been the less outgoing of his daughters, the one resistant to his suggestions about considering interior design (he got an earful from Sharon about that, about not giving Norah space). After college, she had drifted through a series of jobs, and he had dutifully stopped asking her about what was happening, Sharon’s space admonition recurred in his mind each time they met, and over the years he had resigned himself to her eventual low-level harmlessness, even uselessness. She’d disappeared. How could that have happened? It had all come at
an incredibly busy time; the preliminary work for the consulate competition was just beginning and they had cut the ribbon on the archives building in Edmonton. He had felt a twinge of embarrassment when he learned she was enrolled in film studies, the unease arising not from the subject material Norah had chosen but from the fact she was already well into her second semester when he found out, inadvertently, from Susan. She hadn’t asked him for his advice or his money. Maybe this was her way of showing him the seriousness of her plans, he thought.
It also occurred to him that a short film could be the way for him to stay in the public eye, the one venue available to him to maintain an association with his vision of what the consulate could have been. Who knew where something like this would be broadcast—in fact, it wouldn’t even need to be broadcast; maybe it would just go viral and he would become a cause célèbre, making his case to the public and contesting the suspension of his license. He could turn the opening of the consulate into a moment of high drama; Martin versus Catherine and J-S and the Russians, one man against the system, show them for the opportunists they so clearly were. His plans for the consulate side by side with what the eventual designs would be. The visionary in contrast with the compromised.
“Sure, I’ll do it.”
“Are you up for it tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’ll be ready,” he said, and he was fairly certain Norah smiled.
She closed the door as he said “Thank you.” He lay back in bed, trying to organize some sort of monologue for Norah’s film. A manifesto would be wrong, too strident. He needed to talk about his history, his influences. The first thoughts that came to him were reflexively about Melnikov, the house that he’d built, and for a moment he had trouble sorting through the facts, pulling threads of now-intertwined stories apart.
Now he knew why he had made Brendan take him out to the lake: It was intuitive. We seek what we need, he thought, and this house was unmistakably, immutably him. There was a point in each project where you would necessarily have to walk away, but this house was different. He stood from his bed and put both hands on the base of the window, staring out into the darkness of the lake.
He knew the land from when there was nothing here. He had walked the property with Sharon and her parents the summer after they married, the summer they’d decided not to abandon Montreal for Toronto, refraining from joining a more vocal but smaller-scale exodus than the one he’d witnessed growing up in Detroit.
Thirty years before, not fifty yards from the window where he now stood, Martin had declared to his father-in-law that he would design it himself, build it himself. He’d watched the corners of Henry’s mouth turn up fifteen degrees (maybe Henry had known, even then, how the zoning headaches, the Lac Massawippi Residents Association’s objections and injunctions would follow such a boast, how all of that would end up emboldening such a plan).
The four of them had stood there, digesting what he had just said. Shoreline and the thin strip of pine across Lac Massawippi and the perfect marbled corridor of sunlight on the water. He would build a house here. He would make this his. Theirs.
The construction of the lake house was delayed for a year as the Residents Association mulled the possibility of a postmodern addition to the Lac Massawippi shoreline community of, as they explained in their first letter, “more aesthetically consistent” cottages. There were meetings to explain the association’s concept of aesthetic consistency, hoping the young architect in question would understand the concerns of the community and revise his plans. An impasse followed, lawyers’ letters were exchanged, and a zoning board arbitration hearing was scheduled.
The saving grace for the lake house was that the galvanized metal facade that had been so widely maligned and served the source of the complaint (Martin had received anonymous hate mail that he, like any self-respecting architect, carried around in his breast pocket like a threat from a rival suitor) was essentially hidden from view by the foliage and the local geography, and the “less offensive” glass wall that made up the western—waterfront—elevation was really the public face of the building. And if Martin Fallon wanted to indulge his architectural fancy, as the Residents Association grudgingly admitted once the arbitrator’s decision has fallen against them, they had no recourse to stop him.
He built the lake house for himself and his family, according to his exact specifications, and in his life Martin admitted experiencing no greater professional satisfaction than watching the lake house take shape on the shoreline. Yes, the lake house was the vital thing, he told himself, source material.
Martin returned to bed, closed his eyes, and could see again the tradesmen arriving, the successive arrival of pickup trucks, and it was during this thought that the action sped up, night and day strobing, the foliage of the property’s trees swelling and falling like his own breath, the structure beginning to emerge from the ground. Existing. He remembered the trailer that they’d brought to the site that summer, the tiny space that they’d all crammed into for three weeks, and he remembered silently and slowly making love with Sharon in the dark of the trailer, their girls sleeping mere feet away, and he thought that nothing was claustrophobic if it was truly desired, and these were our desired lives.
Chapter 14
Martin sat very still as Norah prowled the back patio with her camera. Establishing shots, she said offhandedly when he asked what she was doing. Perspective. The work before the work. The camera was smaller than Martin had thought it would be, a fragile, almost marsupial presence that settled in her hand. Brendan, standing on the patio with both hands in his pockets, studied the microphone that jutted out of the camera and looked vaguely hurt that he had nothing to do.
“We’ll start in a few minutes, Dad,” Norah said.
“What are you going to ask me about?” Martin asked, and tried to suppress a yawn.
“I don’t typically let people know the questions ahead of time. You okay?”
“Didn’t sleep well. What are you going to ask me?”
“How about Melnikov? How far are you on your project about him?”
“It’s coming along,” Martin replied, lying. “Bit by bit. I’m trying to dictate, and that makes it slow going. But it feels ready, you know?”
“Know the feeling well. Let’s see, then; we can talk basics. Early influences. We can discuss the house itself later,” Norah said, pointing the camera at the house and walking away from him, with Brendan in tow. “We’ll start in a couple of minutes, Dad.”
His career—his life, really, when he thought about it—began long before he found himself roaming around Melnikov’s backyard with his architecture professor. It started with a walk up a flight of stairs to a second-story architecture office before he was even certain that architecture would be his career. He could still feel that wrought-iron rail under his right hand. It was Montreal in the autumn of 1968. The city was different without his family, promise and threat both amplified. His first year in Montreal was a year of scraping; a rushed registration at McGill in the faculty of arts followed a frenzied search for a job and a place to live. Eventually, he installed himself in a Park Extension studio apartment with little more in the way of space than a jail cell. The part-time job proved just as unpromising, probably nothing more than gofer work in a small local architectural firm, whose phone number he had torn from the bulletin-board notice pinned up at the School of Architecture. Tolerable and dull, he thought, as he climbed the stairs to the second-story office on Greene Avenue, no more than a block from the sleek new Mies van der Rohe complex that had gone up the previous year. He tried not to think about that; because whatever ambitions he had were tempered by the need for rent money, the need to stay afloat on all accounts. And so, appreciative of dullness and tolerability, he knocked on the door marked EVANS & SMITH—ARCHITECTS already resigned to not having much choice in the matter.
During the interview, Martin thought he picked up on the origins of a frown on Michael Evans’s face when he described the circumstances sur
rounding his flight from Detroit. But Smith, perhaps the younger of the two (by mere minutes, he imagined, as he could almost immediately see them fraternally twinned in the womb, their understanding of limited space and the needs of the other each formed at so early an age) could not suppress his grin at the frisson of giving refuge to a draft dodger. They shook hands. That’s how business was done here.
Walker Smith and Michael Evans were old school, bow-tied, tweed-jacketed exemplars of gentlemen architects. Very West-mount, he was told—whatever that meant—and only too happy to occupy themselves with midsize projects that seemed forgotten in the glamour of the recent blitz of building in Montreal. Their office—modest, busy, and daily cast into the shadow path of the neighboring Mies leviathans—described their practice very well. The darkness of a modern eclipse in the midafternoon, followed by their inevitable emergence, another day’s work fully done.
Evans & Smith were proud generalists, employing no landscape architects (“I rather like that work,” Michael Evans said, almost apologetically, to Martin in explanation) and refusing the projects so big that the structural engineering and construction management were beyond them. For Evans & Smith, Martin would answer the phone and organize files and stay out of the way of the real secretary, Simone. In his spare time, he was left alone to, in the words of Walker Smith, do the important work of drafting and thinking without a particular project in mind.
Within a few months, after proving himself generally competent and interested, Martin found himself being invited on site visits with his bosses. What struck Martin most was the silence of the two men as they walked through a site, whether it was the foundation of a project in progress, the empty shell of something they were refitting, or just terrain; the two would not exchange a word. At first, this was disconcerting, leaving him to think he had stepped into the perilous terrain of some fresh spat with an unknowable history, but he soon realized that each was simply working in his own way. Evans would stop to make notes every minute or so while Smith scouted out the periphery of the site. They would meet back at some point and share a haiku of distilled professional experience, something that, to his untrained ear, sounded only obvious or inconsequential.