Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  It was the same look in the face of the young man holding the placard. A rough look. He was not strident, just noting a breach in etiquette. He wasnt from town either, he was from around the bay. And he was the only man. One of the women laughed and another was looking at her watch, just the way Arthur did. I won’t have it, she said. And Arthur slowly realized what Nell was saying. Arthur Twombly lit a cigarette and waited behind the wheel of the car he loved. He had given up smoking when his second son was born. Almost twenty years. He was going to see his son tonight. He felt the chill you get when you leave a public swimming pool. It may not be yours anyway, she said. And he knew what she meant and had hoped with eighty percent of his heart that she would say that. Other men. He would be generous though, he would not cave into anger, because part of him knew she was giving him the easy out. He was alarmed at the sudden new creation and how a corner of his brain thought it was Zac coming back.

  Okay, he said, whose might it be if you dont mind me asking.

  A boy, she said.

  Okay, a boy. And they returned to the hotel and did not talk until he was changing his shirt and said he was having dinner with his son, which meant she was on her own for the night.

  HE ARRIVED at the apartment on Elizabeth Avenue, the one I was sharing with David Twombly. And that was the night we went to the hockey game and had an uncomfortable dinner at the Battery Hotel. There was a moment when the visiting goalie asked for an ice repair, and Mr Twombly pointed this out. That the referee shaved some ice with his own skate and tamped the fresh ice in the gully with the hockey puck and sprayed the shaved ice with the goalie’s water bottle. He liked that the referee had used everything at his disposal, and nothing new specifically meant for ice repair.

  SIX

  HELEN CROFTER DISCOVERED the green envelope of photographs Arthur had sent in to get developed on Caribou Road. They were lying in his study the weekend he went to St John’s. She’d picked them up to look at them again. There was one of herself that she wanted to destroy. She felt she wasnt photogenic, and that was too bad as we were going to be photographed more and more. She’d seen the pictures, or some of them, the ones he’d said were good of her but were not, some of the dinner party and a few of their son just before he’d left for university. She’d asked Arthur to give David the one of her and him, to remind her son that his mother loved him, for there was love in both of their faces. But Arthur had forgotten it, it was still there in the pack. Though it did not feel like a full pack of film and she counted them and there were fifteen photos in the package. She withdrew the negatives to see which ones he’d brought. There were four hinged panels of six. She lifted a strip of negatives to the light and saw faces that were not faces she knew. She focused to turn the black face white and the white hair black. They looked like someone else’s photos, entirely foreign, and she was prepared to return them until she saw the one face, they were all the one face now. Photos of a student who had been to dinner. But it wasnt the dinner. There was utter delight and abandon and shyness and entitlement in the negatives, a linked sheet of them, an inappropriate gesture in every goddamn picture of this girl. And the things in the background were not of this house. It was another time and place these pictures, there was no dinner party going on in these pictures at all.

  She had thought, like Arthur, that they had turned a corner. But what if it had only been before the summer. Could she forgive it if this was last year. But he wasnt here for her to confront him. She had to wait.

  Helen waited the three days. She forgot about the photographs for twenty minutes and then remembered them for an hour or two. It wore on for the three days that Arthur was away. Then she heard the car door. She ran to the porch. She couldnt believe she was running.

  The pictures, Arthur.

  Oh you found them.

  I found the negatives.

  He collapsed in the hallway. He was carrying his soft carrier bag and it was this shoulder that slid down the wall and he was sitting on the bag, one leg bent beneath him. He could not think of a thing to say. Nothing seemed plausible. He was surprised to see that he was crying.

  We had a little thing, he said. I’ve barely kissed her.

  But he knew that Nell’s predicament would be discovered. There wasnt much inventiveness happening in the factory of his brain. His brain knew he was done for. He had collapsed partly for the shock value but the crying was unexpected. Then he thought of something.

  Richard, he said, has been sleeping with her. Those are Richard’s pictures.

  Are you all right down there. Youre not having a heart attack.

  I’m exhausted, he said. It was exhausting.

  So you had a little thing you were saying.

  There was a tone in his wife’s voice he had heard before, but usually when Helen was discussing with him her father who hurt her emotionally when she was a teenager. Arthur opened his mouth. I kissed her once, he said. It’s Richard. She’s actually pregnant.

  You dont know a thing about your friends, she said. Not one thing.

  He wasnt afraid of his wife. He wasnt afraid of anger and being the cause of upset, but he was unnerved by this tone of voice. He had partly forgotten that he had slept with Nell Tarkington. Nell’s admission that it was not his baby had made him think of Richard, and that solution overwrote all that had happened before.

  I think theyre seeing each other.

  It hasnt occurred to you, Helen said, that Richard is gay.

  What was she saying, and could it be true. And of course it was. What kind of mind did he have, that he could not see what Richard really was. His wife knew, his wife knew everything. She was the smartest woman ever. Did she know that the weekend he shared with Nell in St John’s they did not make love. Would she know that. Would she give him some points for that. They hardly touched each other. When a man decides to stop seeing someone, it’s as if they have never slept together. An unclear window remains, which he shares with the woman he’s slept with. But the majority of him feels loyal.

  It was a relief to him, especially after the fiasco of the St John’s trip. It irritated him that so much had been planned and, in the end, nothing done. But then he realized a lot of work had been done. Sometimes saying one sentence is a lot of work. It couldnt be Richard’s child. He had been trying to figure out a way to tell Helen and now he could say it. But it was worse than she’d thought.

  Pregnant, great.

  It was a boy, he said. That one, Joe Hurley. She said it was someone else’s.

  That was not the information that would exonerate him, he now knew that. Helen had been upset when he’d had an affair with Debra Logan. Debra was Helen’s age, there was the utter loss of reason after Zac had gone. It was the idea of a student and that he’d invite her to their house. That she’d see her things. She’d compare. Perhaps he thought a student was not a threat. A student can propel large folds of life into the sexual act. Helen had been a student, she remembers crushes. Debra Logan was married and thirty-nine. It was more like a form of yoga to Debra Logan, sleeping with Arthur Twombly. But a student. That reflected on her, on Helen getting old. It had been over a year since Zac’s death. She wouldnt be judged that way. It was mean of Arthur to have hidden it. Was it cold, it was an insult. And worse than unthinking. It suggested nothing that she could improve on except a time machine. She did not for one second believe he had only kissed her. You slept with her here, she said, in David’s bedroom.

  When she met Arthur, in graduate school in Ann Arbor, she took him boating in Saginaw Bay (her parents have a cottage at Worth Corners). They skied and hiked in White Cloud—Arthur’s neck of the woods. His father took blind people downhill skiing. She’d watch him assist amputees climb in a bucket with outriggers. The blind he skied in front of and told them what they were hearing. That’s a gondola, those are trees to your left. It was deeply moving and it made her want to have a piece of him, the son. They both got summer jobs as interpreters at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit. The Vietnam War
made them marry early, but Helen was never in doubt. It wasnt cavalier and, even though she’d been a wild teenager with liberal parents who encouraged her to go to university and not entertain marriage, Helen could think of nothing more correct than marrying Arthur Twombly. She was immediately pregnant and that made them think about raising children in the States. What about Canada. Helen saw everyone as both insecure and entitled. But Arthur Twombly was the opposite: confident and humble.

  They felt Canadian already, in that Canadians surrounded them. Michigan is very Canadian. They applied for work all over Canada and she had Zac in Ann Arbor. It was easy then to emigrate, and they received bright pamphlets about small towns in Ontario and British Columbia and Newfoundland. The Newfoundland one was hilarious. The ambition of the government and a colour photograph of the premier holding the five hundred thousandth Newfoundlander in his arms. In front of a new hospital. As if hospitals were factories. The hospital was in Grand Falls.

  They went for an interview and landed at the military base of Gander. There was a college in Grand Falls where Arthur could teach classes in English and history. The concierge at the hotel said that Fidel Castro had just spent the weekend. Fidel likes to go rabbit hunting, the man said, handing them their room key. At the interview Arthur asked about that. When Fidel’s missing for a few days in Havana, the college administrator said, you can be guaranteed he’s here in Grand Falls.

  But they had seen nothing as bleak as Grand Falls. It wasnt on the ocean. The trees were spruce and fir, grown for the pulp mills. Perhaps Fidel likes to snowmobile and set snares, but the biblical phrase of seed thrown on arid ground came to mind.

  In their hotel room, Helen found an ad in the Gander Beacon for a legal position at the air base in Stephenville. She called, made an appointment for Monday afternoon, they rented a car and drove there. That’s when they first saw Corner Brook. A fjord, my god the city is built on a fjord. And a mountain range. There were birch trees and hills and the sun shone well even though the city was facing north. Hector Martin at the interview agreed with Helen and said the Appalachians fell into the ocean off Maine and then pulled up again to form the west coast of Newfoundland.

  Now she felt like the mountains had fallen into the gulf. Her knees were sinking. She wanted to be the one to collapse, but if they were both on the floor they’d laugh and she wasnt about to let Arthur laugh. She shouted at him for five days. She beat on his neck and a hardness, like a fold of aluminum, rose over her shoulders. Then he’d see her soft and sorry for herself. Once she let him hold her and Arthur knew it would be okay. But then the aluminum rose again and cut through his hands. One day she tore the plug heads out of the power bar, as if the connections made him do it. A chair was thrown and a leg went clean through the drywall. Arthur was afraid to turn his back on her, he saw her coming at him from out of the dark and felt the plunge of a carving knife in his kidneys. Then she recovered, or at least returned to a calm pool, and in that calmness she announced in a dead tone that she was leaving him. I will debit whatever it costs, she said. You’ll keep the joint accounts open and filled. The voice was the same instructional tone she used when reminding him to get a haircut. But the new plan was to construct a fork in the river. She was through with the vast promise she had trusted was there. Helen Crofter fell into a hatred for her own amateur romanticism.

  Arthur had woken up in his son’s bed. Helen was in the doorway. At first it looked like she was forgiving him. But then it was a stare of desperation.

  We have beautiful things, she said.

  Youre the strongest woman, Arthur Twombly said, I’m ever likely to meet.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her own shoulders. She was trying to encourage herself. Big lives, she said, depend on finding those sorts of women.

  Arthur looked beyond rescue. He looked drowned. But what if you ruin them, he said.

  You believe too much in the self, Helen said. And governing one’s emotions.

  And he knew that was true. I tend, he said, to cut losses even when it means severing love.

  Neither of them knew if splitting up would help them get over Zac. They both thought probably not.

  HELEN WORKED LATE at the office on Main Street. There was much wrangling over jurisdiction of inland coastline and she lost herself in the wrangling. The mill had dams through a chain of lakes, and Helen had secured ninety-nine-year leases on a quarter of the timberlands of the entire island. She needed access to power from the Deer Lake hydro station, and Bowater required laws that were already on the books be observed by cabin owners. Now she was having to visit dams and take photos of the water-level meters for court hearings, to supply evidence of the pulp mill’s solid management of the water supply. Building codes were being ignored, she argued, and properties flooded and lawsuits filed when the mill raised or lowered the level of water for its tugs and pulp-log booms.

  When she went home she had to turn on the lights just for herself. Sasha wasnt home much these days. She was staying a lot at her boyfriend’s. They had agreed that Sasha could do what she wanted. But now Helen wanted her daughter here to make it less lonely. She was in the house where her husband had been sleeping with a student in their dead son’s room. She ate a cold leg of chicken with salt. She liked the idea of eating one thing at a time. Richard Text would be back soon. Could she live in the house with Richard. Could she tell him to live somewhere else. Did she need the money for the mortgage. Why was she so unhappy and would moving away help. Her parents in Michigan, what to say. David was coming home for Christmas. My god Christmas, they’d have to tell him.

  She went up to Zac’s old bedroom and looked at the bed. She saw them there, her husband and Nell, and it bothered her. She was hot to it. She refused to become her husband. That men can do that. She was not impressed with the callous behaviour of men.

  She stripped her own bed and looked at the mattress. She decided he at least hadnt been with her here. She tried turning the mattress and the next day she felt a pain in her lower back. She felt like that girl was jumping on her tailbone.

  For three weeks Helen worked and grew less happy. She lost nine pounds. A colleague, Lisa Tremblay from Trois-Rivières, was looking for a roommate. If you know of anybody.

  Arthur came by to pick up more things.

  I dont want to stay in this house, she said.

  He hadnt known she was unhappy about the house. She told him about Lisa Tremblay. She could share a house in townsite with Lisa. You can have the house.

  Arthur:What about Sasha. What about when David is here.

  I can’t look at things in the house, she said, it makes my heart too heavy.

  How do things spiral into mad behaviour. Arthur called his son to warn him of the separation. Should he come home or just stay in St John’s. No, come home. Your mother. We both love you.

  David hated the fact that his Christmas was ruined. Sasha was going to her boyfriend’s for Christmas, so it would be just him and them. He swam laps at the university pool, and while he was underwater and in the rhythm of the crawl, he understood that he was a little scared of the new situation. He loved going home to the peace of his room for ten days and relaxing out of schoolwork and driving his father’s Audi in the snow and seeing his friends who had returned to Corner Brook for the holidays. He realized he was not comfortable in the house alone with his father. They needed his mother as a buffer. They were not used to direct communication. They were both good at talking, but somehow the presence of the other made them feel self-conscious, as if they each knew the tricks the other generated to be convivial. David’s mother, they both realized, helped shape themselves around each other, the way Zac used to. They sat at meals and ground out conversation. They were too much like each other.

  My parents have split up, he told me. And my father’s been having a fling.

  David and I had been taking a philosophy course, a course I found very difficult for the dense reading. He said, Youre reading the books?

  Eve
rything except the introduction, I said. He looked astonished. That’s all I read, he said, is prefaces and introductions. And I realized he read short philosophical books like the maxims of Rousseau, Pascal’s Pensées and the aphorisms of Nietzsche. When he had an argument it was usually coloured by the sayings of whatever philosopher was open on his night table. But he was also good at knowing who had written what, even country songs. Once he heard a singer say he loved “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. And David said, quietly, That’s not a Kenny Rogers song. Don Schlitz wrote that. Don Schlitz was twenty-four when he wrote it. And then he’d leave the room. There was something anxious in David to succeed early.

  David woke me up at three in the morning and we pulled the plugs on several appliances and drove home for Christmas. It was Zac’s old blue Matador. David liked to start well before dawn and have the sun come up in your rear-view mirror and arrive in Corner Brook by noon. His calfskin leather gloves left on the dash to dry. He liked saying to coffee vendors that he was in St John’s that morning. The air vents in the dash sprayed out frost.

  We fell into a lull, the hypnotic lush of snowflakes in the dark speeding past us like we’re some spaceship drifting through the spackle of a solar system. The ground we drove over, I now understood its geologic makeup. One of my professors had published the first tectonic map ever made in the world. It was of Newfoundland. The land we were driving over was a mix of North American rock and African rock and the first ocean this world ever had, a precursor to the Atlantic: the Iapetus Ocean. That’s what we were driving over now, the world’s first ocean. This sense of the past made me conscious of who we were. We were living our brothers’ lives. We were in Zac’s car. We had grown up in a time when we missed the major cultural events. We had the second-best of things or the sequels to the classics. We watched Rocky II and Grease, whereas our brothers had seen the original Rocky and Saturday Night Fever. This sounds trivial but it can affect the level of importance one gives the world. Ali was past his prime so Dave and I settled for other boxers to champion, in the lighter divisions. We followed Salvador Sánchez and Alexis Arguello. We loved the sound of their names, but also the intensity of having to make weight. It was like reading the minor poets, even preferring them to Shakespeare and Donne. David said if he ever had a son he was going to call him Salvador and suddenly this thought of a child hurtled us into the future. This was a time when our future was up for grabs. We still believed in the childhood truth of comic books. We read comics. I had British comics and David had the richer American comics. My grandfather sent the English comics overseas, rolled up, with the hollow of the roll filled with a bunch of red-and-white ballpoint pens. The pens were from Ladbrokes the Bookmakers. And I thought Ladbrokes made books, that my grandfather knew people who produced books. I read of Captain Hurricane who flew into a raging fury, and bullets bounced off his chest. David’s DC Comics showcased Sergeant Rock. Rock was lugubrious and ambivalent. He was in colour. David looked at my black-and-white English comics and touched the illustrated panels. As if the whole point of comics was colour. But then a realization struck him, that black-and-white was the best that England could do.