by Susan Cory
As she was about to ask him about his Rotterdam project, a short Classical melody emmanated from his inside jacket pocket, muffled by high-ply cashmere. He slipped a cell phone from his pocket, read the screen, and frowned.
“Sorry, I need to take this. I'll be right back.” He raised a finger and headed toward the door.
Iris watched through the windows as he hunched over his phone, a hand over one ear.
A minute later he hurried back to the table. “That was someone from my home security service. There's been a break-in. I'm afraid I need to go.” He signaled to the waiter, making a scribbling motion in the air.
“I can drive you. It'll be faster. You walked—right?”
They found her Jeep parked on Brattle Street and Xander directed her the dozen short blocks to the small Victorian house that Harvard had rented for him. Fiddling with his watchband throughout the nine minute ride, he leapt out before Iris had come to a complete stop.
The blinding blue strobe of a Cambridge Police patrol car lit up the flanks of a double-parked van from Safety First Security and a Harvard campus police car. Light from the front hall spilled out the gaping front door.
After a few words with the policeman, Xander strode quickly back to the Jeep, his face misted with sweat. He leaned through the open car window. “I'm so sorry that our evening has ended this way, Iris. We will have to have a —what do they call it—a do-over dinner. I had a delightful time. Thank you for the ride.”
Then he retreated to the porch. But Iris didn't leave right away. She parked down the block and walked back. She approached the front yard, trying to make out voices over a squawking police radio. She saw Xander talking with men in three different uniforms.
“No sign of a break-in,” the man in a Safety First Security uniform announced. “Don't know why the alarm went off.”
“Probably a short in the system. We opened the front door ourselves with our passkey,” the Harvard campus policeman said.
“Can you take a look around inside and tell us if anything's missing?” the police officer asked Xander.
As the men headed inside, Iris peeked through the windows, at a living room where nothing seemed out of place.
It struck her as ironic that an evening spent discussing life as a testament to beauty and order should end on such a chaotic note.
CHAPTER THREE
On Saturday morning at around nine, Xander, in his black silk dressing gown, carried a delicate espresso cup and saucer into the study. He consulted his watch and since he had several hours before he and Nils were planning to unpack the rest of his boxes upstairs, he decided to Skype one of his project architects who always spent Saturday afternoons at his desk in the Amsterdam office.
After logging on, he noticed an unfamiliar icon among the others. Curious, he clicked on it. It opened to reveal a disturbing image.
Two young girls playing in the woods were—oh, God, what were they doing? Or rather, what was being done to them?
As realization dawned, he dragged it to the trash, emptied the trash, then pressed the power button, waiting until the screen faded to black before he let out his breath.
Xander ran his hands through his long, wavy hair. How did this get on his laptop, and more worrisome, how had someone, presumably, learned his personal password?
He breathed deeply, allowing the galloping pace of his heart to slow down. He could conjure up plenty of people who didn't like him—competing architects, women he might have treated as afterthoughts...But this level of invasion? Someone had managed to penetrate all of the security firewalls Nils had carefully erected.
That person was taunting him, knowing he would never go to the police. But why?
Xander reached for the pack of Black Sobranies on his desk and tapped one out. His hand shook as he thumbed his Dunhill lighter and lit it.
The doorbell's jangling ring made him drop the cigarette. He quickly retrieved it, then snapped shut the laptop. Tightening his bathrobe around him, he headed for the front hall.
Could some anti-porn SWAT team have tracked the download and be encircling his house already?
Xander's shoulders lowered an inch when he recognized his neighbor through the front door glass panel. Gilles, the dean, had brought him to meet this Stuart-or-Steven-something when Gilles had showed Xander his lodgings for the semester. Xander took a second to compose his face into a friendly expression.
“Hi there. It's Stuart Kunstler from next door,” the pale, freckled man with an overly large head said. “We met the other day. Sorry to call so early on a Saturday.” Stuart was as unlikely a SWAT team ninja as was possible to conjure up.
Xander ushered him in to the hall. “Good morning, Stuart. Can I offer you some coffee?” Xander hoped the other man didn't notice his slight tremble when they shook hands.
“No, no, don't bother yourself. As I mentioned on Wednesday, I'll be leaving next week to go on sabbatical in Turkey. Since you'd said you didn't have a car, I thought I'd leave you the keys to my van in case you wanted to make a grocery run.” Stuart held up a keyring with a small plastic dog attached. “This key unlocks the garage. The van's a stick shift. You know how to drive that, right?”
Xander was itching to get rid of this man, so he quickly agreed, “Of course. That's so kind of you to share your car. I hope you have a productive fall in Turkey—Istanbul if I remember correctly. It's a fascinating city.”
Stuart finally took his leave and Xander promptly dumped the keys into a kitchen drawer with no intention of ever using them. He found his iPhone on the kitchen table, checked the time, then tapped the first entry on his speed dial.
“Nils? Can you swing by my place? I need your help.”
Nils responded, “I was planning to come by in an hour to help you unpack the boxes.”
“It's about something else, an emergency.”
“Fine. I'll ride over now.”
Nils would know how to make sure all signs of the incriminating pornography were truly erased. Hopefully it hadn't yet shown up on the radar of anyone official tasked with monitoring who downloaded this kind of stuff.
As Xander lit a new cigarette and sucked in another hit of nicotine, an idea occurred to him. Maybe this had something to do with the previous night's break-in. Maybe the point of it had not been to take something away, but rather to leave something behind.
CHAPTER FOUR
“How did it go? What did you talk about? I want to hear everything.” Ellie's voice preceeded her as she entered Iris' kitchen at noon on Saturday. “I can't believe you went to dinner with Mr. Hot-Stuff last night and didn't even call me afterward to tell me all the details.”
“I'm telling you now.”
Ellie made a beeline for the two signature sandwiches from Darwin's laid out on the counter and after examining both, claimed the roast beef, and grabbed a stool.
“The guy is amazing,” Iris gushed. “He's orchestrated his whole life perfectly. He's not just obsessed with creating great buildings. He writes poetry, for God's sake! Everything he eats and drinks is carefully chosen. He swims every morning before work. From the three outfits I've seen him wear, he wears only shades, no colors.”
“Sounds exhausting,” Ellie said as she eliminated the radish sprouts from her sandwich.
Iris forked her unwanted pickle onto Ellie's plate. “By the way, the pork shoulder at the Harvest is incredible. I highly recommend it.”
“What did you talk about? Weren't you intimidated?”
“He asked me about my philosophy of life and what I was passionate about.”
“Whoa, what a come-on line!” Ellie said.
Iris chewed thoughtfully. “But it wasn't. There was no sexual vibe. He's just one of those rare people who is turned on by his life's work. I wish I could be more like him. I like my profession, but it's not consuming the way it is with him. I waste so much of my time on junk. Junk food, junk TV, junk reading. Maybe if I were more self-disciplined I would be designing the world's best architectu
re like him.”
Ellie cupped her hand to her ear. “Is this cuttingedgedecor's September centerfold I'm hearing?”
“I'm small potatoes compared to him. Damn, do you think it's too late to reboot my career?”
“He may have designed some incredible buildings, but as far as creating a perfect life, let's get real. The guy's in his forties, has never been married, doesn't have kids, and doesn't seem to have a serious 'other,' either female or whatever. That's not my idea of a life of beauty and balance. At the end of the day, all he has is his work.”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I've never heard any gossip about his social life. I was prepped with my speech about already being in a relationship, but he never showed any romantic interest in me.”
“Then why do you think he was so intent on taking you out to dinner?”
“Maybe he just wanted company. He seemed interested in my life, which was flattering and surprising. He encouraged me to go back to making sculptures.”
“With all your spare time?”
“If I did away with distractions the way he has I'd have enough time.”
“Distractions? Like me and Luc?”
“Of course not. You know what I'm talking about.”
Ellie held up a funnel next to some bottles in the island sink. “What’s going on with these?”
“I'm pouring shampoo and conditioner into glass bottles. It drives me crazy that products for women only come in insipid pink or mauve plastic. Do these companies think we're Barbie dolls?”
Ellie shook her head slowly. “This is a slippery slope, my friend. You're picking up his obsessiveness. What's next—eating only white food? Tell me what happened at the end of the evening. Did he give you a peck on the cheek?”
“I almost forgot that part. As we were finishing our coffee, he got a call from his alarm service about a break-in, so we rushed over to his house.”
“You're kidding! Did they catch anybody?”
“No, it must have been a false alarm—maybe a short circuit in the wiring. Nothing even looked disturbed.”
“Maybe another starchitect wanted to steal one of his designs.”
“I wouldn't mind stealing one of his designs,” Iris admitted.
Ellie's eyes drifted down to Sheba, Iris' six-year-old basset hound, who was parked at her feet and giving Ellie her most pathetic look. “She never feeds you, does she?” Ellie said, passing down a crust.
Iris looked affectionately at her chubby dog and tsked tsked. “You're a complete fraud.”
Sheba's overly-short legs combined with her overly-long ears gave her a comical appearance. The hound's expression could morph from dignified to groveling in the seconds it took the scent of beef drippings to waft to her sensitive nose.
After feeding Sheba another crust, Ellie continued, “I'll make you a bet. If you ever dropped in on Demigod DeWitt unexpectedly some evening, I'll bet you'd see him eating Doritos in his jammies and watching sitcoms, not reading Schopenhauer.”
Iris shook her head. “You cynic. Here's the rare guy who's devoted his whole life to one thing—the creation of beauty.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The following Monday, Iris and Ellie gathered with their students in a meeting alcove on the third level. The four floors of studios resembled a giant row of bleachers with four enormous steps. The vast, open interior housed up to six hundred students who worked on one of the giant steps under a sloping glass roof which leaked frequently—usually when final drawings had been laid out on desks waiting for a presentation. To Iris, the space seemed antiseptic at this early point in the year, since the smells of stale coffee and unwashed students had yet to build up. That sensory load would begin to ramp up as soon as the first studio deadline approached.
Iris gave silent thanks to Professor Ito who'd cancelled for leaving her with a second year studio to teach. Her ten students had none of the frozen-in-the-headlights look of first years or the brittle, embattled look of third years. Not to mention Harvard's burned-out, extra-semester students who were rarely seen. The ten in front of her looked relaxed and eager to dive into the intellectual pursuits of a new semester. The class composition was a mix, equal males to females. Half of them were international students.
Ellie began: “Why don't you each tell us a little about yourselves and how you spent the summer?”
Predictably, many had worked as underpaid interns, slaving over 3-D models, fetching coffee, or sorting carpet samples in architectural offices around the country. Most seemed to enjoy an easy camraderie developed over the previous school year spent in intense proximity. Not all, though. Iris studied the two who didn't seem to fit the mold.
Rory was in a different movie from his classmates. Contrasting with their plaid shirts and jeans, was his well-cut sport jacket with a monogramed shirt. His aquiline nose and posh British accent suggested he was just stopping by after a weekend house party at his country estate. But despite the elitist vibe, he seemed genial and his classmates appeared to accept him as an eccentric, but welcome, member of the pack. Rory had spent the summer in London working in “Uncle Marty's” London office. Someone helpfully explained to Iris and Ellie that “Uncle Marty” was Sir Martin Alsop, who'd won a Pritzker Prize for designs such as the Freerly House Museum and the Queen's Dome in London. The Pritzker was an architect's version of an Oscar, except only one was awarded each year.
Another student leaned against a nearby wall as if using it to prop herself up. Jasna, a tall impossibly thin woman, dressed in baggy harem pants and a black top cinched with a belt, seemed shrouded in isolation. She watched the others with large soulful eyes behind wire-rim glasses. When it was her turn to speak, her softly accented words required everyone to lean in toward her. She had spent the summer in New Hampshire working as a carpenter for a contractor. Name, rank and serial number—no elaboration. Iris felt the others regard Jasna warily as if she were an volatile organic compound.
Ellie passed around printed syllabi for the course. “This studio is meant to be an in-depth study of the urban infill project that Iris is actually working on now. The schedule of pin-ups and reviews is listed. I'll be starting off our studio times with short presentations on topics such as the history of townhouses, public versus private spaces, and the interrelatedness of interior and exterior. Today Iris will give you the project brief including all the necessary spaces and technical requirements. Following that, we'll take a walk over to visit the site on the other side of Harvard Square.”
While most of the students were jotting down notes on the hand-outs, Jasna had dropped into a chair and crossed her arms, not bothering to record anything.
Iris described the project itself—a townhouse with private and communal spaces for six visiting GSD professors. She explained the site requirements and concluded with “this studio will be exploring designing in cross section as well as plan. We'll look at using new materials. We'll even design a structural system. By the end of this semester you'll have experience putting a building together from start to finish. We'll progress from diagrams, to clay or cardboard massing models, to digital models using Rhino software, ending up with a full set of drawings and a detailed physical model.”
Rory steepled his manicured hands and asked, “Would you mind if I hand-drafted my final work? I find the quality of the drawings to be richer.”
“By all means do it by hand,” Iris said. “In fact, you might even get extra credit for hand-drafting.” Big smile. She herself disliked the rigidity of computer-aided design. She looked around for more questions but ten expressions telegraphed “got it.”
After Ellie and Iris' introductory presentation, the students retreated to their nearby desks to lock up their laptops and grab their cameras for the field trip. Most workspaces were paired off in tight, two-person pens, with partners in the confined areas referred to as “butt-mates.” Iris looked to see who Jasna's butt-mate was but the desk next to hers was empty. A lone luxo lamp and backpack occupied her space.
<
br /> Iris wondered if, like herself twenty years before, Jasna had a voice inside her head telling her she didn't belong here.
CHAPTER SIX
That evening, Iris pressed the buzzer at Luc's condo before letting herself into the entry with a key he'd given her the month before. Why did she still buzz first? He knew she was coming over.
Sheba whined and shivered as Iris nudged her into the rickety cage elevator. “Sorry, girl. I'm too exhausted to walk up five flights.”
Luc's 1930's brick condo building was located across the street from his restaurant, the Paradise Café, and just a few blocks from Iris' Victorian home-cum-office. They'd been spending most nights together when Luc wasn't cooking, but he'd gone over to his mother's house the previous evening for the family's monthly Sunday dinner, a ritual to which Iris had not yet been invited.
His door stood ajar. As Iris entered the unit, she heard him call out, “In the kitchen.”
Luc was bent over the island, with a knife flashing through a yellow pepper, dicing it to bits. His blond hair fell below the collar of his black shirt and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal strong forearms that contrasted with slender, elegant hands. He was six years younger than Iris. They had been together for three months, still within the so-called “honeymoon” phase of a relationship.
He looked up as he swept the pepper into a salad bowl, gave her a slow and easy smile, then wiped his hands on his apron. “How'd your first day go?”
She walked over, raised her face to Luc's and kissed him deeply. Soon she was cocooned in his embrace, and when she spoke, it was against his hair. “It's looking up now.”
After a minute he murmured, “Even better after I get you some Prosecco.” He retrieved a bottle from the fridge, and soon placed a brimming flute on the pine kitchen table.
