About Time, page 10
Twice I opened my mouth to tell her that I had to have that bracelet back, that it was a family heirloom and that I’d get her another that was bigger, better, and even gaudier. But I simply could not get the words out; I just couldn’t do it. Could you take a big delicious piece of candy away from a child, telling her you’d get her a better one some other time? It just wasn’t possible to take that bracelet away, yet the thought of a genuine slave bracelet being entirely wasted was more than I could stand. It was too much to bear, and I had a sudden idea.
I took out my glasses, put them on, and then—careful not to lift my eyes too high and catch sight of her face—I slowly looked up at Frieda. The embroidered forget-me-nots were gone today but I hadn’t forgotten; there beside my desk, ankles bowed outward and one wrist steadily revolving, stood the world’s most spectacular figure. And now, by an inspired act of will, keeping my eyes carefully lowered, I pictured Zoe’s lovely face at the upper end of that splendid torso. It was a spectacular combination, and I stood up saying, “Kiss me; you are my slave,” and she did, her arms winding immediately around my neck.
It was great! It was wonderful! And when we finally stopped, Frieda sighed deeply and said, “Do you always put on your glasses to kiss a girl?” I said yeah, and she said, “Then why are your eyes closed?”
“Shut up and kiss me again,” I said and she did and this time it lasted even longer and was tremendous. Just kiss a girl like Zoe some time with your arms around a figure like that, and you’ll know what I mean. It was so great, in fact, that the actual truth of what was happening faded from my mind. In a fit of delirious absentmindedness I languorously opened my eyes, and there only half an inch away and staring into mine were Frieda’s eyes—all of them. I got so dizzy I had to break loose and sit down on the edge of the desk; not because of the split-level eyes in assorted sizes—I was used to them now—but because every single one of them was chock full of love. They were filled with it! They swam with it! And from an enormous distance I heard Frieda saying, “Oh, Ted, darling, you’re wonderful! I love you! Open your eyes!”
I couldn’t; I’d closed them again instantly and they were squeezed tight as though I had soap in them. Then I forced myself; cautiously opening my eyes to a slit I looked again. They were still there in front of me, those four half-eyes each aflame with the light of love, and I slammed my eyelids shut knowing that, although it hardly seemed possible, I’d managed to make things infinitely worse. “I’m crazy about you, Ted!” Frieda was saying. “I’m your slave!” She reached out and pulled off my glasses saying, “Please open your eyes and kiss me again!”
Bravely, I looked out once more; she was peering tenderly out at me from behind that jungle of hair looking as though she’d just jumped from a plane in a burlap parachute in which she’d become hopelessly tangled. I thought of pretending to faint, when my phone rang and I snatched it up before the first ring had stopped. It was just one of the account men with one of the foolish questions they ask, and which I answered with a word. But I kept the phone at my ear long after he’d hung up, saying, “Yeah,” and “You bet,” over and over again, occasionally looking up at Frieda and shrugging helplessly. Finally she had to leave, giggling and murmuring horrible endearments, and I hung up the phone, covered my face with my hands, and planted my elbows on the desk squarely on the glasses Frieda had put there, smashing both lenses, but I was beyond caring.
Later, splashing cold water on my face in the washroom, I wondered what to do. Here was a girl helplessly in love with me and it was all my fault; maybe I was morally obliged to pretend that I, too—but I knew I couldn’t do that. I went back to my desk, and three times that afternoon Frieda looked in hopefully, lovingly, and I told her that I had a headache. At quitting time I found her waiting at the elevators, and told her my headache was far worse and by this time it was true; it throbbed and pounded, and I stumbled home to a night of hideous dreams.
I don’t know whether Frieda guessed the truth that night; I’m just not sure. But all next morning she didn’t come into my office, though I kept glancing up every time footsteps sounded anywhere near my door. When noon came and she still hadn’t come in, I was suddenly filled with remorse and fear. This was a nice girl, I’d probably hurt her feelings terribly, and—what if she were at the river, in it by now going down for the last time, refusing to struggle? All noon hour I prowled along the river front cursing myself, worrying, and when I got back to the office, and sat down at my desk, and Frieda came in friendly and happy as ever, I jumped up and yelled, “Where were you this noon!?”
She just smiled, and shook her head. “Want some?” she said, holding out a wrapped candy bar clutched in her hand like a banana; but printed on the wrapper just above her fist I could see the first word, Love, and the beginning vertical stroke of the next, and since Love Nests aren’t really my favorite, I said no, thanks. But when she peeled off the wrapper, and urged me again, it occurred to me that I could hardly be expected to kiss her with my mouth full of candy, so I took a bite. Surprisingly, it was delicious, and when she offered me some more, I took another. Her eyes gleaming with love, she said, “Finish it,” insisting with a gesture, so I did—chewing slowly, postponing as long as possible what I was afraid would happen next.
It happened. “Kiss me, lover,” Frieda said then, and I looked up at her, my mouth opening to say that my headache was back. But I didn’t say it. My mouth stayed open but I just sat looking at her astounded. It had suddenly occurred to me that if Frieda would simply use a judicious bobby pin or two and unsnarl that knot at the back, her hair would not only stay in place but would become a very handsome pageboy bob. And that if she’d just take off those crazy—I stood up as though in a dream, and did it myself. I pulled off those nutty glasses, and her various half-eyes merged in pairs like the split images in a camera viewfinder coming into focus, and turned into a single set of enormous, beautiful, myopic blue eyes. She couldn’t see me now but I could see her, and her face was absolutely lovely, every bit as beautiful as the accompanying figure which I now found I was holding in my arms. I started to say something about contact lenses but decided that could wait while this could not—and I kissed her long and lingeringly.
For a moment I drew back to look down at that wonderful face, then grabbed her to me again, murmuring all sorts of trite phrases such as “I love you,” to which Frieda said, “Of course,” and, “When can we get married?” to which she said, “As soon as I finish your birdhouse.” Looking down over her lovely shoulder, I noticed the candy wrapper lying where she’d dropped it on my desk, and now I could read both the words printed on it. Love Potion, they said in big blue letters and now I knew where Frieda had been during noon hour.
Where the Cluetts Are
* * *
We had open books and magazines lying on every flat surface in the room. They stood propped in a row along the fireplace mantel and lay face up on the seat cushions of the upholstered chairs. They hung like little tents on the chair arms and backs, were piled in layers on the big round coffee table, and lay scattered all over the carpeted floor. Every one of them was opened to a photograph, sketch, floor plan, or architect’s elevation of a house. Ellie Cluett sat on the top of the ladder I used to reach the highest of the bookshelves. She was wearing a gray sweater and slacks and was slowly leafing through an Architectural Forum. Sam, her husband, sat on the floor, his back against the bookshelves, and now he held up his book for us to look at. This was the big room I worked in and I was at my drafting table watching them.
“How about something like this?” Sam said. It was a color photograph of the Taj Mahal.
Ellie said, “Great. The big dome in the center is just right for a television aerial. Okay with you, Harry?”
“Sure. All I have to do is design the place. You’ll have to live in it.” I smiled at Ellie. She was about twenty-three, intelligent and likable.
Sam said, “Well, I wish you would design it and quit pestering us about it.” He grinned to show he didn’t mean it, though he did. Sam was wearing slacks and a sports shirt and was about my age—somewhere just over thirty.
Ellie said, “Yes, Harry, please. Have it built, and phone us in New York when it’s finished. Surprise us! Honestly”—she gestured at the roomful of opened books and magazines—“I know we promised to look through all this, but it’s driving me crazy.”
“I’ll have the rooms padded, then. In tasteful decorator colors.”
“Damn it, Harry, I think you’re being pointlessly stubborn,” Sam said. “There are only two things that matter to me about this house, and you know what they are.”
I nodded. Sam owned a big boatyard on the Sound. He wanted a house here in Darley, Connecticut, because it was only thirty minutes from the yard. He sold his boats by demonstration and entertainment, so he wanted an impressive house to take his prospects to.
Sam said, “That’s all I care about, and you won’t change it if you lock me up in here.”
“It isn’t as though we’d really be living here,” Ellie said gently. “We’ll keep our apartment in New York, you can be sure. Except for the boat season, we’ll hardly be in Darley.”
I didn’t want to lose this job. Just before the boat craze began, Sam Cluett started his boat works on nothing; now he was rich and offering me a free hand in designing a show place with nothing skimped. I wanted to do it and needed the money but I said, “I can’t do it alone. If this house doesn’t mean enough to you to give it some time and work and to develop some opinions and enthusiasms about it, then I don’t want to design it. Because it would never be much of a house. It wouldn’t be yours, mine, or anyone’s. It would be a house without life or soul—or, even worse, the wrong kind of soul.”
Absolutely identical looks came to their faces: brows raised in polite question, eyes alertly interested in and amused by the notion of a house with a soul.
I suspected that I was about to become an anecdote back in New York but I was going to save this job if I could and I smiled and said, “It’s true, or close to it. A house can have a life and soul of its own. There’s a house here in Darley, twelve years old and it’s had nineteen owners. No one ever lives in it long. There are houses like it in every town in the world.” I stood up and began walking around the room, hands shoved into my back pockets, picking my way through the scattered books.
Sam sat watching me from the floor, arms folded. Ellie sat on top of the ladder staring down at me, her chin on her fist. There was a faint smile of interest on each face and they looked like a couple of sophisticated kids waiting for the rest of a story.
I said, “It’s an ordinary enough house but I prowled through it between tenants, once, and began to understand why it never kept an owner. Everywhere you look the proportions are just faintly unpleasant. There’s a feeling of harshness to the place. There’s even something wrong in the very way the light slants in through the windows. It wasn’t the designer’s fault; the house simply developed an ugly life and soul of its own. It’s filled with unpleasant associations and after you’re in it awhile it becomes downright repelling. I don’t really understand why, and I’m an architect.” I glanced at Sam, then at Ellie, smiling so as not to seem too deadly serious. Ellie’s eyes were bright with interest. I said, “There’s another house in Darley that no one has ever willingly left. Those who’ve left it, the husbands were transferred or something of that sort, and I’ve heard that each wife cried when she had to give up that house. And that a child in one family said and has continued to say that when he grows up, he’s going to buy that house back and live in it. I don’t doubt these stories because I’ve been in that house, too, and I swear it welcomes you as you step through the front door.”
I looked at the Cluetts again, and began to hope. I said, “You’ve been in that kind of house; everyone has. For no reason you can explain you feel a joy at just being in it. I almost think that kind of house knows you’re in it and puts its best foot forward. There’s a kind of felicity about it, everything in it just right. It’s something more and better than any designer could consciously plan. It’s the occasional rare and wonderful house that somehow acquires a life and soul of its own, and a fine one. Personally, I believe that kind of house comes out of the feelings and attitude and actual love for it of the people who plan it and bring it to life. And that has to be the people who are going to live in it, not just the architect. When I design a house I want it to have a chance of turning out to be that kind. But you’re not giving yours any chance at all.”
It didn’t work. For half an hour, the Cluetts were contrite and industrious, searching through my books and magazines, pointing out to me and each other houses, rooms, windows, doors, roof styles, bathrooms, and gardens they liked or said they did. I sat at my table again, listening, but I knew their interest was synthetic and I added no more notes to the pad in my clip board. I had only one: “Enormous master bdrm w. fireplace.” But every client says that; I could have it printed on my note pads. And the Cluetts had nothing more to add, they really didn’t care.
Finally, Ellie put a book back on the shelf beside her, then stood up on the ladder and began scanning the top shelf boredly. She reminded me of a child reluctantly doing homework, ready to welcome any diversion, and now she found one. Pulling out a book, she dislodged a thick wadding of paper crammed onto the shelf beside it and caught it as it fell. She unfolded it, opening it up finally to half a dozen big sheets of linen drawing paper each the size of a newspaper page. When she saw what was on the top sheet she slowly sat down on the ladder top, staring and murmuring, “For heaven’s sake.” After a moment she looked at me, saying, “Harry! What in the world is this?”
“Just what it looks like.” I heard the tired irritation in my voice and forced it out before I continued. I wasn’t going to take their job, but I liked the Cluetts just the same. “Those are drawings for a house, architectural drawings,” I said more pleasantly. “That top sheet is a perspective showing what it would look like finished. The sheets underneath are the working drawings for building it. They’ve always been up there; belonged to my grandfather. Most of the stuff on that top shelf was his. He was an architect and so was my father.”
Sam was getting to his feet, pleased with the diversion, too, and Ellie quickly turned on the ladder, hurried down it, then dropped, kneeling, to the floor and smoothed the big top sheet flat on the rug. “Look!” she said excitedly.
Sam and I went to stand beside her, staring. The edges of the paper were yellowed but the rest was bone-white still and I remembered that I’d once meant to frame this and hang it in my office downtown. It was an India-ink drawing, the lines thin, sharp, and black in the scribed and ruled precision architects once favored. It was an incredible sight—I’d almost forgotten—but there lay the clear sharp-etched architectural rendering for a house of the early 1880s just as its designer had conceived it in every gabled, turreted, dormered, bay-windowed and gingerbreaded detail.
“Imagine,” Ellie murmured, her voice incredulous and delighted. “Why, it never entered my head that these houses were actually built!”
“What do you mean?” Sam said.
She turned to look up at him, eyes shining. “Why, they’ve always been here—forever! Since long before any of us was born. They’re old, shabby, half tumbling down. It simply never occurred to me that they could ever have been new! Or not even built yet, like this one!” Quickly, she began spreading out the other sheets in a half circle.
I knew what she meant and so did Sam, and he nodded. It was strange to see at our feet the actual floor by floor plans—the framing plans and sections, full-sized profiles, every last detail, all precisely dimensioned ready for construction—of what had to seem to our eyes like an old old house. And for some moments, then, silent and bemused, we looked at the careful old drawings thinking the wordless thoughts you often think looking at a relic of other earlier lives than your own.
It seems to me that it’s usually impossible to get hold of another time. You look at a pair of high-button shoes, the leather dry and cracked, buttons missing, the cloth uppers nearly drained of color by the years, and it just isn’t possible to get into the mind of some long-gone woman who once saw them new. How could they ever have been new and shining, something a woman might actually covet?
But these old drawings lying on the floor beside us weren’t quite like any other relic of the past I’d ever before encountered. Because these were the house before it was built; old though they were, these were still the plans for a house-yet-to-be. And so at one and the same time they were quaint and old-fashioned, yet new and fresh, still untouched by the years. And it was possible to see in them, and feel, not merely quaintness but something of the fresh beauty the architect must have seen and felt the day he finished them a lifetime ago.
Ellie was getting to her feet and I turned to look at her. Her jaw actually hung open a little and her eyes were wide and almost stunned in a kind of incredulous awe at what she’d just thought of. “Sam!” she said, and grabbed his forearm. “Let’s build it!”
“What?”
“Yes! I mean it! Let’s build it! And I’ll furnish it! In the style of those days! Why, good lord,” she murmured, turning to stare at nothing, eyes shining with excitement, “there’s not a woman I know who won’t envy me green.”
Sam is bright and used to making decisions, I suppose. His eyes narrowed and he stared at Ellie’s face as though testing or absorbing her feelings through her eyes as she stared back at him, elated. Then he stepped forward abruptly and looked down at the drawings again for half a minute. He took a few paces around the room, then turned to me. “Is it possible, Harry? Could that house be built today? Is it practical, I mean? Could we live in it and have it make any kind of sense?” Suddenly he grinned, delighted at the notion.
