The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  They had probably brought the architect. Fitch hated architects the way anyone might hate someone who demeans him for not being able to realize perfectly a bunch of vague instructions in service of foolish and unnecessary theories. Not a week before and in the presence of the client, Fitch had answered an architect’s hectoring and accusative question with the words, “Because, if I hadn’t put it there, the upper floors would have collapsed, that’s why. You forgot to support them properly. It was correct on the early drawings, but you left it out of the finals. Perhaps your hand slipped when you were clutching your automatic pencil.”

  “I don’t use an automatic pencil,” the architect had said, his face the color of a cherry.

  “You should,” Fitch said as the architect stormed out, “it would do a better job.” And, then, to the distressed client, “Don’t worry. He’s not building this, he just thinks he is.”

  Neither an architect nor Lilly’s husband was flanking her, but two older people who walked as stiffly as cranes. Divorce, thought Fitch, and a bad one. He left her. Screwed her. Her parents are paying for the apartment and holding her up between them. As badly as the woman might take it, for the parents to see their child wounded was far worse. These people were in their seventies and probably their most fervent prayer was that she would be happy again before they died. Fearing that she would not be, they would be so protective that they would treat Fitch like a plunderer.

  They were suspicious, as Fitch knew quite well anyone has the right to be upon meeting a contractor, and they seemed so reserved and so intent upon protection that it was as if they had said, “If you do anything to harm our daughter or exploit her in any way, we will eviscerate and burn you.”

  The father was tall and thin, with an old-fashioned brush mustache, very neat. He too had dark horn-rims and an intelligent face. He wore a gray greatcoat, a plaid scarf, and no hat. He looked like Robert Trout. To Fitch’s relief, the mother was not in a fur. Every winter day in New York Fitch passed a hundred thousand old ladies doddering along in furs. Though they could afford them, they could not carry them. Someone of fragile build in a fur coat always seemed to Fitch to have been devoured by a wolf or a bear. If underneath a heavy fur there was not a gorgeous fertile body, it was just the preface to a funeral.

  Fitch himself, at fifty-three, might have been taken for a bear. His massive face appeared to be bigger than the faces of the three people he was about to meet even had their faces been fused into one. His immense hands were strong from wielding hammers. His body was like a barrel. And yet he had the same quality of expression, the same kind of glasses, the same careful and thoughtful look, as they did. Were the parents academics, like their daughter, they would have their higher degrees, as she did, and as he did, too, although he had never done anything with his except, in the sixties, earn them.

  It was his nature to read rather than to write, to listen rather than to speak. Erudite and learned, he had been overcome at an early age, upon the death of his father, with a reticence that would never leave him. As if guarding what he knew and saving it for heaven, he confined his output to the production of beautiful rooms with plaster moldings as white as wedding cakes, with deep and glistening floors, magnificent cabinetry, walls like smooth prairies, and tranquil effects of light and shadow. That was his output, and all the rest, all his knowledge and contemplation, which was so immense that it seemed to require his very large body to hold it, stayed and developed within as he read, pondered, and learned, and as the work of his intellect perfected neither article nor book but only his soul. That is not to say that he was comfortable with this, but that he had no choice in the matter.

  “You’re Fitch?” asked Lilly’s father.

  “I’m Fitch,” said Fitch, with no choice in the matter. The way he said it was a signal to Lilly’s father that he, Fitch, was never going to take advantage of her.

  AFTER THE HEAVY DOOR had been pulled shut by its spring, they stood for a moment, listening to a faulty radiator valve. Someone once had tried to close it and broken it further, and as it rattled and hissed it made the pipes knock with the lonely sound that haunts the winters in New York and echoes from floor to floor of apartment buildings and tenements like the complaints of a dying man. The air was hot and dry, as it will be in most empty apartments in winter, but Fitch refrained from opening a window, for he was a guest, even if, just having taken possession, Lilly, too, moved as carefully as a stranger.

  Had the place had a soul it might have been offended that its owners had abandoned it and left it dirty. Dust lines on walls and floors betrayed where furniture had been and currents of air had run along its edges. The wall behind the stove was almost blackened, the exhaust fan covered by dust and grease with the texture of velvet. Porcelain had yellowed and chipped, light fixtures in bathrooms and in the kitchen were the mass graves of hundreds of desiccated flies, and the windows were anything but clear.

  They took creaky stairs to the upper floor. In each bedroom and in one of the bathrooms the previous occupants had left telephone books, hangers, and dead lightbulbs. In one bedroom window, one of the panes had been replaced with cardboard from a frozen-dinner box. The only illumination on the second floor was the mysterious glow, as if from an astronomical photograph of distant galaxies, of the office buildings across the river in Manhattan. It was wind-whistling and bleak, but beautiful nonetheless—white, tranquil, and deep.

  Aided by her hands moving like those of a policeman directing traffic, Lilly explained to what extent she wanted to enlarge one bedroom at the expense of the other, and that she wanted to change the hall so that one entered the bathroom from the enlarged bedroom.

  “Do you want to keep the skylights?” Fitch asked with professional detachment, almost brusquely, looking up.

  “Yes,” Lilly answered, bewildered. “The roof garden is mine alone.” The skylights were of opaque glass, and privacy would have been assured even had she not been in sole possession of the roof garden.

  Fitch had asked about them not in view of privacy but because the roof garden was accessible from the roofs of adjacent buildings, and skylights were a common means of forcible entry. Had she seemed less vulnerable, he might have gone on to reinforcement and alarms, but he was silent, unhappy that she might be thinking less of him because it seemed that he was unable to appreciate the even and filtered light that opened up the rooms beneath the roof to something more than simply day.

  On the roof itself the wind forced its way through their coats and chilled them as much as they had been overheated moments before. The office towers of lower Manhattan, cold and brilliant, loomed up like an immense cliff. Red lights at their tops blinked arrhythmically. One could see even the flow of the river marked by the movement of its speeding and broken ice, and the traffic on the bridges looked like sequins on an evening dress. Snow was left on the roof, and the wind would pick it up capriciously and move it from place to place, sometimes blowing a sparkling veil of it over the parapet and into the night. The roof was three quarters covered by a deck, and Fitch had noticed that the ceilings of the floor below were stained. The deck would have to be replaced and the roof redone.

  “Let’s go down,” said Lilly’s mother, the coldest, and they gladly descended to the first of Lilly’s floors, the building’s fourth, where they gathered to talk, in a room lit by the dim light that came from across the river, as the radiator hissed and the pipes knocked.

  “Do you have an architect?” Fitch asked.

  “Do I need one?” Lilly asked back.

  “An architect would think so, but it depends on what you want to do and how much you trust me. An architect will tell you that without him I’ll pad the job, use inferior materials, and run with the money. And many contractors would do exactly that.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “When we redid the kitchen it was the architect who cheated us, not you, and you easily could have, couldn’t you.”

  “Yes,” said Fitch. “I wouldn’t have done a good job
of cheating, but I’ve been cheated enough to know the rudiments.”

  “I heard you say something then,” Lilly told him, “that you didn’t know I heard.”

  Fitch waited.

  “You didn’t know I had come in, because one of your men was on his way out and the door opened and closed just once as we passed each other. I was taking off my coat, and you were talking to … the foreman. Gustavo?”

  “Gustavo.”

  “And you said, ‘I hate liars.’ You were angry. You were very angry. You see, I trust you. And I’m not going to give you a huge amount of money to start.”

  “What I can do depends on what you want to do. What do you want to do?”

  She told him: the kitchen, baths, changing the bedroom dimensions, painting, repairing the little things that were broken, bookshelves everywhere. “My husband and I have many more books now than even what you saw in the apartment two years ago. We moved them from our parents’ houses, and they just keep coming in.”

  Fitch was pleased to discover that it seemed there had been no divorce. “I’ll work up an estimate,” he said, taking out a little notebook. “Give me a fax number.”

  She did. It had a 914 area code.

  “In a few days, you’ll get a rough picture of what I can do and for what price.” He had completely forgotten the impact upon his schedule that this job would have. “Then you can add, subtract, replace, modify, and we’ll go back and forth until I can show you some plans, and cut sheets for materials, fixtures, and appliances. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, that’s fine,” she said. The parents said nothing.

  Fitch was hungry. He wanted to get home and eat. He needed to talk to Gustavo and Georgy. He needed a hot bath. But he wanted to leave with less abruptness than the sudden silence suggested, so he took a step toward the windows of the living room, his face lit by the skyscraper light, and said, “On September eleventh, we were working on Joralemon Street. When we heard that the first plane had hit, we went up on the roof. Everyone kept on saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ and we stayed up there, and watched the towers come down. The dust on the windows is from the Trade Center. It will have to be washed down very carefully, or the mineral grit will scratch and fog the glass. And it will have to be done respectfully, because the clouds of dust that floated against these windows were more than merely inanimate.”

  When he turned back to them, only the father was there. He could hear Lilly on the stairs, and her mother following. Fitch thought this was somewhat ungracious. Then her father moved a step toward him and took him lightly by the elbow, the way men of that generation do. His tweed coat reminded Fitch of old New York; that is, of the twenties and thirties, when the buildings were faced in stone the color of tweed, when the light was warmer and dimmer, and when in much of the city, for much of the time, there was silence.

  “Her husband was in the south tower,” the father said quietly. “He didn’t get out.” Then he turned and went after his daughter, walking stiffly down the stairs, like a crane.

  • • •

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, Fitch had returned home, with fresh fish and vegetables, to a Chelsea apartment that overlooked a large garden and was as quiet as the New York of his childhood. He made a fire in the woodstove, quickly did the mail, and prepared his dinner. When he was forty-eight and the first Mrs. Fitch had left him for a new life and a new job with an investment bank in London, he had decided that he would refuse to become, like so many divorced men, a habitué of restaurants, and instead had learned to cook.

  He had one immense room with a tiny bedroom off it, and a luxurious bathroom that he had copied from a luxurious hotel. As his dinner cooked slowly over the fire in a Japanese wrought-iron pot, he sat close by on a rush chair, staring into the flame. The only light other than firelight was a warm fluorescent beneath the cabinets suspended over the kitchen counters, blocked except where it glowed within a pass-through.

  Normally as he made dinner he would read, or listen to the news, but now he just sat still and watched the broth lightly boiling in the pot. For almost an hour he stared into the fire. Then he replenished it, ate, cleaned up, and returned to position. For a man with no living family and very few friends this could have been quite lonely, but wasn’t. He was counting with his fingers, shuffling numbers in his head, calculating square footage, weeks and days, hours, costs, taxes, fees, and rates of interest. He was calculating them neither desperately nor greedily, but, rather, casually, as if he were watching a tennis match. And yet, underlying his ease and relaxation was an inflexible resolution. At nine-thirty he picked up the phone and pressed 1. “Gustavo, are you busy?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause while Fitch thought. Gustavo knew that when Fitch called and ten seconds were held in suspension, changes were due. “We’ve got five jobs at the moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll finish in the order Smilksteen, Yorkville, Liechtenstein, the chicken restaurant, and Requa, is that correct?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Gustavo. “Put the chicken restaurant at the end. We still don’t know the dimensions of the rotisseries, and we won’t until they come in. I asked them a million times, but they say it’s hard to call up a factory someplace in Korea and get a number you can rely on.”

  “Okay, the chicken place at the end.”

  “Why?”

  “How far are we in Yorkville?”

  “You saw. Twenty-five percent, maybe thirty.”

  “They haven’t paid us,” Fitch told Gustavo. “They’re six weeks late. They think they can get away with it, but we’re almost even, because their first payment covered most of our overhead until now and we can cancel the materials that haven’t been delivered yet.”

  “We’ve already put ten thousand dollars in lumber, electrical, and the start of the plumbing rough-in.”

  “We’ll eat that,” Fitch said. “Shut down the job.”

  “When do you think they’ll pay?” Gustavo asked.

  “No, close it down. I’m not going to play games. They think we won’t walk away from ten thousand dollars. I’ll bet they’ve done the calculation to the penny. Shut it down and take the tools.”

  “Okay, tomorrow morning.”

  “Now we’ve got four jobs. How fast,” Fitch asked, “can we finish Liechtenstein?”

  “With the Yorkville crew, now,” Gustavo answered, “ten days.”

  “And Requa?”

  “That’s two months, anyway.”

  Fitch thought. “What I want you to do,” he said, “is to pull people off the other jobs to finish up with Liechtenstein and Requa, those two.”

  “So we slow down chicken and Smilksteen?”

  “Yeah, no more than two men on either, until they’re done.”

  “They won’t like that. You’re talking about a month late for both, at least. That’ll kill us with penalty, not to mention reputation.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Just because you want to go to U.N. Plaza?” Gustavo spoke as elegantly as an ambassador, and could have been one. In the beginning, Fitch had had to convince him not to bow and kiss women’s hands, explaining that Americans would think either that he was mocking them or that he was insane.

  “I didn’t say anything about U.N. Plaza.”

  Now Gustavo paused. “Wait a minute, Fitch,” he said. “At the cost of twenty or thirty thousand dollars and three angry clients, in two weeks we’re going to have most of our people free. How could we go anyplace but U.N. Plaza?”

  “We’re going to be two or three weeks late there, maybe.”

  “If they let us in late,” Gustavo added.

  “I’ll talk to them.”

  “If we’re late there, the whole job line will be pushed back. It’ll be a disaster. What did you get, Fitch, Gracie Mansion? The White House? The New York residence of Mr. Bill Gates? It must be very important, and very lucrative.”

  “It’s not lucrative, but it’ll be the best job we’ve ever d
one, and we’re going to do it faster than hell.”

  “What job?” asked Gustavo. “What?”

  “You know,” asked Fitch, “how knights would die for the Virgin, would yearn to die? And how everything in the world seemed unimportant next to their peculiar, settled, certain devotion?”

  “Yes, I know,” Gustavo said, “because that is still very much in the heart of my country.”

  “Well, then you know. Sometimes you find something that’s truly important, and even though it throws everything into disorder you know you have to do it … and it gives you new life.”

  “Let me guess,” said Gustavo. “This new job is for a woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re in love with her.”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know her, and she’s almost young enough to be my daughter. I suddenly came to love her, but I’m not in love with her.”

  “That’s even more dangerous.”

  “Right,” said Fitch. “It is. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  IN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of February, Fitch met Lilly five times at the site and sent her thirty faxes—some quite short and composed of just a single question, but others of many pages, with sketches and lists of costs and materials. He had to have this job, so he priced it honestly but as low as he could, certain that he would get it, and he did. For the high quality that he would provide, he would charge three hundred thousand dollars, a sum that was slightly under her expectations and her father’s.

  Because he was closing down projects in Manhattan, and because she came into and left the city at Grand Central, they agreed to meet for lunch on Friday, the fifteenth of February, at the Oyster Bar. He never met clients for lunch, but he had a great deal to say to her about the contract he would be bringing for her to sign. He knew that she would be surprised that he would have it ready for signing, and surprised as well by its terms.