Chandelier, page 9
“Oh yeah? You build stuff?”
“No, that’s someone else. I imagine the thing. Design it. Somebody else builds,” I say. Though that isn’t really the truth either. At least not now.
He’s already got fourteen questions. Is it business or residential? Anything outside of Ottawa? Barcelona? I can see where this is going on his transparent MBA face. He’s mentally placing all his precious, overpriced Austrian furniture on the corporate floors of my buildings in Shanghai, Riyadh and Mexico City while trying to look cucumber-cool with disinterest.
I finish my whiskey. He is still talking, something about environment and productivity and economics.
“Do you like the terminal?” I ask him, nodding at the copper and limestone finishes, the exposed ductwork and panoramic windows.
“You designed it?” he says, his grin half-incredulous. I push my empty glass an inch toward the bartender, the visual cue directed at my furniture salesman. It’s his round now, if he has any fucking manners.
“This one’s on me,” he obeys. The bartender’s and my eyes agree. He has slugged back the last nip of Bushmills and, immediately upon receiving the fresh glass, drains that too. “Tell you what,” he says, “let me get one more round and then I’d better find the men’s before they call my flight.” And he slides a platinum Visa card across the wood. He’s become tetchily drunk. His mind is on nothing now but a shift in location. I’m impressed. He wasn’t working me at all. Or he was but gave up. Maybe he was actually making conversation. Lonely, like the world.
He gets his PIN number right on the second try.
“Christ, I’m gonna sleep,” he says, tilting on his bar stool. Profound lines under his eyes seem circled with red crayon. I could almost feel sorry for him, so young, with years of these terminal dialogues ahead. He dredges up a leather carry-on from the base of the stool and places it beside the briefcase.
“So, was this airport yours? Did you design it?” He gestures to the concourse.
“No. Not me at all.”
* * *
I could look back. I could write entire books about certain days. I could drag out something from the marriage. Sarah and me. One of our fights would be a great chapter. Like that day in Chicago when she threw the ice cream cone at me in the hotel lobby. We thought it was quite funny afterward. Both of us laughing our asses off in the security office, even with the strawberry stain on my grey three-piece. And Sarah with her mad tears. The injustices against me! There’s a day there, but which one to choose in all that slow-moving, seemingly eventless accumulation of ruin? How could something with such grandeur be so abused?
It was only a half truth I told back there. I was an architect. Quite successful for a while. Commissions. Decent ones. Not the Royal Library in Denmark, but some business designs. A condominium. A regional gallery. There was even my brief reign as cultural panelist on a weekly TV program.
But then something fell. It was a wall, actually, and the best part of the glass roof. There had been an earthquake in the area, it must be mentioned. Ten days prior to the collapse. Nothing Japan-like in scale. One of our cheery, eastern Canadian earthquakes, a few numbers on the Richter. Tilted picture frames and yelping dogs. That kind of thing. But the foundation of my charming gallery had shifted and the wall came down. And what can you do? This is about media and public perception in the end. Engineers were questioned. The building contractors were put under suspicion too. There had been a lot of Montreal mafia in the news. Public servants had been fired, rumours of hefty bribes. There’s big money in development and wherever those dollar signs accumulate there is usually some burly entourage with overseas connections driving very nice cars. For a few weeks it looked like my gallery would be overshadowed by the organized crime circus, one of the tiny tails pinned to their stalwart donkey. But in the age of internet, it’s hard to shake the fallout from a collapsing wall, no matter where speculation shifts. One efficient search engine and your name is attached to fallen public galleries and crime bosses for eternity.
Most of the offers dried up. But I didn’t care. The money had been good but who wants to piss and moan about possible load-bearing options all his life. My forte had been aesthetics. The Philosophy of the Dwelling. The Feng Shui of Glass and Steel. Building these structures was one thing, but the idea of them was far more interesting. I had already been writing architectural reviews for the Globe and Mail and Independent, lengthier articles for Architect Today, so the minor earthquake was a sign. Or a forcible shove.
* * *
They call my flight.
I am going to wait until the last possible second. I am going to finish this drink, pay my bill, take a leak and then stroll toward my gate only once they announce my name. They can sweat a bit. They’re always making us wait. This business flight is on my dime and I’m going to do it at my own pace.
You would think after the unfortunate wall malfunction that my career would be shit, my reputation rubbish, my credit as ghastly as roadkill. But the opposite happened. I was never so interesting or in demand. My status may have been roadkill, smeared across the asphalt, but the spectators liked the colours, the contours and the spectacle of entrails left by my downfall. Why?
Cheek and insolence.
Refusing to crawl in a hole, I carried on blithely, as if, in fact, it was everyone else who had designed that ridiculous wall and I was just on hand to explain it to them. I turned it all around. Instead of accepting the ripe tomatoes thrown at my face, I blew raspberries into the wind. The public wanted a jester and I was there with my jug ears and air horn. Hasn’t it always been that way with me? Criticism is just bait and switch anyway. I have challenged and mocked what others have held dear. The sincerest efforts, when dissected, can become the subject of ridicule and embarrassment. Since no one wants to touch the unpalatable verities, I will.
My cellphone sings a tinny ditty, but I’m looking at it and there’s no name, just an unfamiliar number. A million guesses but I’m not going to answer it now. They can leave a message at this point. Who would be calling me at two p.m. on a Saturday afternoon? I could, after all, be on the runway and powered off lest my satellite signal breaches the cockpit’s sophisticated instruments and catastrophe reigns. I’ll shut it down now, in fact; I’m on vacation. No, that’s not true. I’m on a quest for redemption and closure.
There, you see?
They are just calling my name.
17
A lurch, then we are free of the runway. So much rain earlier in the week, there was talk of delays, cancellations. Though grim clouds beckon through the oval windows, my route is clear. I wave off a complimentary newspaper but munch the barbeque peanuts. South Ottawa, its burbs and green spaces, sweep away beneath our fuselage. I’m suddenly thirsty and wave for a second bottle of water. They are shorter, miniature versions of those on sale in the real world. Is our hydration being rationed? Is this some cost-saving strategy, a payload issue? Some hint of future portioning? Oh, the wars to come. There is no alcohol for sale on this forty-minute flight. The seatbelt lights are still aglow, but I unclip mine. The attendant is at me like a vengeful harridan.
“Sir, your seatbelt should remain on until the warning light indicates otherwise.”
I provide a withering nod, designed to remind her I will not drift off into outer space should we scud across a stratum of turbulence, but she hardly looks like the indulging type, so I lazily slide the straps back over my lap and couple the metal clips again. Her curt “Thanks” is filled with suspicion.
I have always loved to fly. I suspect it started in my mid-twenties, those stolen weekends in Boston or New Orleans with Sarah when the future was a gold curtain about to be raised on a sunlit stage. Other pleasures would surrender themselves in the hotels, but squeezing onto those DC-10s never failed to buoy my small reserves of contentment and anticipation. I never feared. I knew enough of engineering to be satisfied with the design and safety features of airplanes. Statistics show we are in far more mortal danger every single time we step inside a car, yet few of us count rosary beads or hyperventilate as we back out of our driveway. My only hesitation, then, was the cost. Back in those days, I resented having to plunk half a grand onto my credit card for an extended weekend of jambalaya and coitus.
Air travel really blossomed for me once it became free. Or more accurately, paid for by the Globe and Mail or Architecture Now. Writing reviews for them became my open ticket to soar across the Atlantic and Europe on a corporate budget. I’d duly arrive at the inaugural press viewing of some lauded new museum, civic headquarters or private home, and squeeze out my three hundred words of judgement on the aesthetics and applied value of its design. The regional wines would flow. The trays of hors d’oeuvres would drift past, canapés replaced by those ridiculous diminutive burgers that are so in fashion now. What are they called? Sliders.
I wiggle my raised finger at the attendant. She approaches with that saintly touchiness tightened across her mouth.
“More peanuts, please.”
She checks her wristwatch. They have already cleared the used paper cups and snack packages.
“We’ll be landing in Montreal in a few minutes, sir,” she says.
“I’ll enjoy them later then.”
A moment later she drops two packages into my lap to assure me of Air Canada’s unwavering generosity while reminding me to return my seat to its upright position. Soon we are touching the dun tarmac of Trudeau Airport two minutes ahead of schedule.
* * *
I’ve reviewed a few airports in the past. I have always admired them. Most of their designers have judiciously accepted that an airport should be a trouble-free conduit between points of arrival and gates of departure. The experience of them should be nothing more than a transitional flow. When an airport gets in trouble is when its architect wishes to be original and unique. Name all the airports you’ve become lost in; they are likely the result of some quixotic image of future travel. Passage imagined as organic interplay. But we do not want adventure in our transition points. We don’t want interplay. We want ninety-degree turns and clear signage. If travel aspires to be extraordinary, its junctions should be typical. The ones you can’t bring clearly to your mind are the ones that served you best. Ottawa’s Macdonald-Cartier has its artistic flourishes—a babbling water highlight symbolizing the meeting of three rivers, a hapless inuksuk marking what exactly?—but they are kept to a minimum and don’t interrupt the natural flow of monotony ushering travellers through duty free and food courts. Here at Trudeau the experience is much the same. I could hardly tell the two apart, including the views of the runway. The same should be said of many airports.
There are exceptions.
Those majestic mountains surrounding Kuala Lumpur’s terminal emphasized through soaring cut-out ceilings of glass.
Or Abu Dhabi’s curved pillars bursting with Islam-inspired mosaic. Beautiful. But for the traveller: a distraction. Raze them to the ground, says I. Save your panorama for beyond the arrival hall.
You will imagine I’m a functionalist by all this. But that is not exactly the truth. It’s much more complicated, though not as convoluted or sordid as Alan Norcock would have you think. But we’ll get to Alan Norcock in a moment. Yes, we will. Since Alan Norcock is the reason for this particular journey. I’m going to go over there and I’m going to set the whole story straight. Yes, I am ready to draw some moustaches on the poster boy.
I have barely more than an hour between flights but manage to consume a flaccid panini, a Johnny Walker and half a lager. They announce a delay—twenty-five minutes—so I linger a bit in this cafeteria, which struggles to substitute as an authentic Italian restaurant. The gingham design of the plastic tabletops. The bolted, swivelling chairs are lozenges of primary colour. The orange platters with waxed paper have been reduced to a prodded smudge of ketchup.
I power the cellphone up. Corporate logos pulse and flit across the screen. Three calls. My anonymous caller has tried twice but has left a message only at the second opportunity: Hello, Mr. Walser. This is Nora Riedy calling. I work for Sarah Trimble at the agency. Can you . . . give me a call as soon as you’re able? I’m wondering if you’ve been in contact with her in the last few days. Yes. The number at the office is 613-231-2071. Okay. If you can call, that would be great. Thanks.
The second message is from Douglas, her realtor partner, employing that brisk tone he uses to sound busy. He probably is. There is an airy, shouted acoustic sound over the line. Calling while on the expressway, no doubt. A habit he won’t break, even with two traffic fines.
Hugo, it’s Douglas. Have you talked to your ex lately? She doesn’t answer her calls, and I haven’t heard from her since Wednesday. She hasn’t come in to the office, as far as I can tell, and she’s missed a meeting on Friday. It’s just not like her, so I thought you might know if she’s been . . . you know, if something came up. Could you call me? I’m sure it’s fine, but better call. I’m on the road to Mississauga. Okay, bye.
I save the call and roll my head around a few times. Strain has developed across my shoulders, as if the muscles were hoisted by tight hooks to my clavicles. I should have got one of those fifteen-minute massages back at the gate.
Next to me, a couple discuss the addresses on their luggage tags with existential anxiety. Should they have written their home address instead of their Genoa house rental? If lost and recovered quickly, they will have their dining attire and swimsuits for most of the holiday. If the luggage circles the globe for weeks, then it will arrive after they’ve returned to Canada. Will someone be responsible for sending it on? Will it be abandoned in that scenic part of Italy?
Once, Sarah and I spent the better part of a holiday in Rome without our luggage. Those plastic cases enjoyed a sojourn in Singapore while we bandied about the finer restaurants of the Eternal City in newly purchased linens and silks subsidized by Air Italia. It was a licence to splurge, though a portion of the money was our own. Sarah could spend in those days, and so could I. We could eat and drink as if Christ the Redeemer was bringing down the sky. One hundred euros on breakfast if the croissants looked good and it came with a terrace view. At the drop of a hat. “Go for it,” I’d say, as she’d drape a designer sleeveless thing across her imperishable curves and raise her eyebrows in feigned guilt. Then I’d jauntily trundle off to peruse the latest offerings in the Zegna flagship store on Via Condotti.
And why not? We thought we’d have money. We were so sure of ourselves. The market was hot. It wasn’t only set to bake; it was on broil. My commissions were starting; the real estate that skipped mercurially through Sarah’s new office trays was pricey and competitive. The numbers had taken over. When it’s like that you can just let them sit in their accounts and they grow like mould. Some mornings you look at yourself in the mirror and can’t help but wink.
We met in our student days. There was an exhibit on at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. One Thursday morning I hopped off the metro, slugged back a long espresso in a café near the Faubourg, then strolled down St. Marc to the Centre’s glass and steel façade that commandingly overlooked the parish steeples beyond Autoroute Ville Marie. The subject of the exhibit was “The American Lawn.” Crossing the square to the main entrance, voices called out “Touch me,” “Feel me,” “Step on me” from the green grass below my feet. I looked down. Tiny speakers had been placed on the verge, triggered by motion sensors. Inside, the exhibit was quirky. Borderline interesting. Utopian layouts for early community zoning contrasted with diagrams of contemporary urban sprawl. In one room they had squares of Astroturf—differing examples of density and texture from football, baseball and rugby fields—with their corresponding sport shoe. I got easily bored in those days. I drifted toward the windows in the vestibule and yearned to wander off in the unfamiliar street again. But to the side of the entrance was a bookstore, packed ceiling-high with volumes, the mecca of architecture books. I had begun work on a class paper on prison design a few weeks earlier, inspired by my first reading of Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s panopticon. His was a shift in the conception of prison design away from the seclusion of the dungeon fortification. He argued that visibility is the key to incarceration and, ultimately, power. The panopticon contained an array of separated cells observed by a central tower, like a tire spoked on a wheel well. All the prisoners could be viewed by a single supervisor from this central position. Foucault emphasized the effectiveness of unverifiability. Further to the subtle sublimation of the prisoner, the guard’s presence, opposed to the prisoners’ visibility, would be shielded from view by blinds and zigzag entrances, so the prisoner could never be certain when they were being observed. Blah, blah, blah.
I was thinking of the Minotaur in its labyrinth.
Naturally, as the young so often do, I had convinced myself that Foucault’s thoughts on power and confinement had never been truly understood until I alone had read these pages. The idea rivuleted through my grey matter for weeks. Just as Palladio’s concepts of uniformity and proportion led to the beauty of Versailles, or the monumentality of the Lincoln Memorial, so too the architecture of incarceration must be the fruit of an elegant mind. I coasted along the bookshelves of the CCA in hopes of finding more literature on the subject. There were sections devoted to individuals: Niemeyer, van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Gehry, Ando, even Speer. Vitruvius. Hadid. There were historical perspectives of Chicago. Coffee table books on Gothic and Bauhaus. Entire sections devoted to skyscrapers, Arts and Crafts, green design or landscaping.
