by Liam Durcan
“That entrance does not work.” The other would nod and make a note.
Martin remembered following a few paces behind his bosses on these visits, not because he was aware of some unspoken rank or out of mute-lackey deference, but simply due to the clumsiness of walking weighed down by the cardboard tubes that held the fine plans of Evans & Smith. He would walk behind them because that was how one observed them best. This was where he decided on a life in architecture.
Along with his papers attesting to his landed immigrant status, his only other belongings on arrival in Montreal were two suitcases, in one a portfolio of the sketches and renderings he had made in the expectation that he would eventually apply to American schools, growing now thanks to spare moments and materials courtesy of Evans & Smith. The sum of his work. The fear and exhilaration of having only that, of arriving someplace with nothing more than that. Outside his nearest neighbors and the two architects who employed him, Martin couldn’t remember speaking to anyone that first year, as if to reinforce that idea of himself as a true refugee, burying himself in course work that would allow him to be accepted to the School of Architecture.
When he received the letter notifying him that he’d been officially accepted to the School of Architecture, he told only Smith and Evans. They’d both written letters on his behalf, vouching for him in that hopeful, unreserved way that a referee can only do for someone he doesn’t completely know. And besides, these two men were the only people he knew personally. At a celebratory dinner they held for him—attended by their wives and Michael Evans’s young niece, Sharon, who was in town from Toronto for medical school interviews at McGill—Martin remembered how Michael Evans had given him a friendly warning about the amount of work demanded of an architecture student. “Worse than medical school,” Walker Smith added, winking at Sharon across the table. And Martin nodded avidly at this, not just accepting but also welcoming another immersion, another potential layer of work between Detroit and himself.
At the end of that night, Michael Evans offered to drive him home, and Martin recalled that moment, being in the backseat next to Sharon. He remembered her face and its fresh mystery, but for a moment it was Norah’s face from just minutes before. But what he recalled without confusion was that she wore a yellow sundress. He remembered this color on Sharon as it repeatedly honeyed and darkened and then burst again, a small celestial event precessing there next to him, over and over, as the car passed through the shadows cast by the streetlights.
Martin had been embarrassed by the sight of his apartment building and so asked Michael Evans to drop him off at a more respectable corner in Park Ex, a few blocks from where he lived. Evans told him to get a good night’s sleep and then come to the office the next day ready to work. He got out of his car and shook Martin’s hand again. From the curb, he waved good night, and as the car turned the corner, the last thing Martin saw was Sharon’s face in the window, glancing back. He saw this. This happened. He was sure of it.
Without them, he would be nothing. Have nothing. It was this thought, Martin realized, that had tugged at him early that morning in bed as he awoke with thoughts of what Norah would ask him. He would mention Evans & Smith to Norah and then stop, all the firm’s contributions to his life ending with nothing more than a punctuation mark. Or he would say nothing at all.
Martin reasoned that it had taken him no more than a semester in architecture school to abandon his regard for Evans & Smith and their quaint habit of building things, to become a devotee of André Lanctot, the professor who would introduce him to early modernism and the works of Melnikov and the Soviet Constructivists. Lanctot was an architectural theorist and resident brooding visionary on the faculty, an altogether more fitting mentor for an aspiring student. And, as is the case with any hero, Lanctot’s potential fault of never actually having built anything was reconfigured by his protégé into a virtue: He regarded Lanctot as someone whose thoughts and ideas were rigorous enough to exist independently of a mere structure.
Evans & Smith had been so completely forgotten that by the time of his first real date with Sharon—made following a chance meeting at the campus bookstore eighteen months after their introduction—that the only subject he was interested in talking about was Lanctot: the new monograph on the Soviet Constructivists, the plan to go to Moscow to photograph Melnikov’s house, how he was hoping to be the one student chosen to go along. He remembered that Sharon seemed to be unimpressed and how she teasingly asked why he thought Lanctot was so special—he didn’t, after all, build things—and Martin remembered stumbling as he tried to relate how Lanctot caused him to see buildings differently, how his value lay outside the mere physical artifacts that an architect left behind. The mere physical artifacts that an architect left behind, He cringed as he remembered having said that to Michael Smith’s niece and marveled at Sharon’s composure for not abandoning the table for a less idiotic dinner companion. In this memory, Sharon wears a yellow dress, a conflated moment that makes him nervous that all his memories, even the most vivid and meaningful, are not facts, but creations to serve some need he cannot admit or fathom.
“Tell me about your influences, then,” Norah said, and for a moment Martin felt blinded by the late-morning sun.
“I was fortunate to have studied under and been a protégé of André Lanctot, who fostered my interest in the Soviet Constructivists in general and Konstantin Melnikov in particular, and, well, he was key in both helping shape any aesthetic I have tried to establish as well as developing my own writing about the period.”
“Was Lanctot responsible for any notable works?”
“Professor Lanctot was an architectural theorist, perhaps one of the brightest architectural minds this country has produced. He wrote and taught, but he didn’t build.”
“You visited Moscow with him, saw Melnikov’s house, didn’t you?
“I did,” Martin said, and in saying so was overcome with a feeling—vague but with complete certainty—that he had already spoken about the visit, that it had been discussed and prepared in a way that made talking about it now repetitive. Derivative. “I met him. Once.”
“Didn’t you also work with Michael Evans?”
The question felt like a thumb had been gently but assertively placed on his breastbone, and Martin tried to look at Norah for the first time during the interview, but he was able to focus only on the gaping mouth of the camera. “Uh, well, yes. I wasn’t an architect, or even a student of architecture when I worked with him.”
“But you did work with him.”
“I did. I worked for him. How did you know about Michael Evans?”
Norah tilted her head away from the camera and toward her father. “Mom told me. He was, after all her uncle. Great-uncle to the filmmaker, if you must know.”
“I didn’t know she’d ever spoken to you about him. What else did she say about him? About me?”
“She told me that he said you were a better architect before you had ever gone to your first class than most of the new graduates he hired.”
Martin nodded and looked out at the lake. It was natural, he thought, for a young man to seek out someone who could make him great, that even Evans knew this and understood this was a necessary step in a young architect’s education. It was almost to be expected. And as Martin reassured himself, he also understood that just forgetting Smith and Evans had been somehow insufficient. Adopting Lanctot as a mentor had required something more declarative than simply leaving his former teachers behind. And so, on the day when Lanctot deigned to ask Martin about his work experience, Martin mentioned Evans & Smith and, when his new mentor’s face registered only puzzlement at the name, Martin gestured in a way to reassure Lanctot that there was no reason that he should know the name of a small and inconsequential local firm. More than thirty-five years later, Martin remembered the moment and, more vividly, the gesture, a brushing motion with his right hand, as though trying to remove lint from his pant leg. Subtle, succinct, and nothing less t
han a repudiation.
“That was very kind of him to say. Your mother never told me he said that.”
“It was years ago, and I guess she felt it was said in confidence. He also said that he understood why you never came to him for a job after you graduated, that you were as ambitious as you were talented.”
Martin felt the corners of his mouth draw tight and wondered whether the camera could register the difference between a grimace and a smile. “It sounds more like a critique than a compliment.”
“I don’t know how he meant it, Dad.”
“Could I ask you a question?” Martin said. There was a pause.
“You’re asking me?” Norah said.
“Yes,” Martin replied. “Turn the camera off.”
“What did you want to ask?”
“Turn the camera off. Please.” Norah put the camera aside. “Tell me: What do you think he meant?”
Norah paused for a moment. “I don’t know. I do think it would be ideal if talent and ambition were somehow matched, and maybe that’s all he meant; maybe he wished that sort of balance for you. I see filmmakers who have all the talent in the world and no ambition, and I get the feeling it’s more of a pity than a tragedy. I suppose it’s sad, but it’s self-contained. Maybe they’ll fail, or maybe they’ll create a masterwork that only they will know about. I always found it a little bizarre—people really seem to have a problem with what they see as talent going to waste, like it’s a moral failing. Lots of people have ambition to spare, ambition that so completely outstrips their talent, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. And ambition is different, too, I think; it answers different needs. I think I can tell when I’m watching a piece by someone who is more ambitious than talented.”
“In what way?”
“Maybe it’s just me, but things seem calculated. There’s less joy.”
Martin sat back in his chair. “What do you think of this house?”
“I think it’s fine.”
“How would you describe it to someone, a friend, who’s never seen it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It does. You’ve lived here.”
“It’s your house, Dad.”
“It was meant to be more than that.”
“I think of it like sculpture. I think I can appreciate it best in that way.”
“As a house. Tell me what you think of it,” Martin said. Brendan had reappeared in the outer limits of his field of vision after having momentarily vanished. He had his back turned away from Martin and Norah, as out of earshot as one could be without taking to the water. Martin looked back at his daughter, who seemed to be studying something in her hands before raising her gaze to meet his. “Is there joy in this house?”
Norah smiled in a gentle way and shrugged and said nothing. She looked over her right shoulder, out to the lake.
From inside the doorway darkness of the lake house, Martin listened to the sound of Norah’s car first being loaded and then driving off, the fading sound of an engine like an ellipse.
Earlier, after a couple of phone calls, Norah had announced with a sudden urgency that her plans had changed and she needed to leave. As she packed up her belongings in the spare bedroom, Brendan came to him, grabbed him by the arm, and leaned close to him, speaking in reined-in whisper that felt like a hammer tapping an eggshell: “You should say something to her.”
“What could I say?”
“You could say anything, that it doesn’t matter what she thinks about the house. About a house, for God’s sake, Martin. She’s just upset that you felt insulted.”
“I did feel insulted,” Martin replied. Brendan’s face appeared blank and he let go of his brother.
Martin retired to his room and then returned in silence to the doorway to listen to her say good bye to Brendan. The sound of their voices was replaced by a short shush of gravel being disturbed, which he assumed was the moment where his daughter stood on her toes to kiss his brother on the cheek. He listened for, but did not hear, his own name spoken.
Chapter 15
Martin sat motionless under the sun until he felt the unmistakable tingle of a burn on his forearms. He tried not to think about Norah, probably now on the highway, still a couple of hours from Montreal. Whatever direction. Just putting distance between the two of them.
He turned his head away from the sun. It wasn’t his habit to spend much time on the patio, and it was a surprise to him to discover that at this time of day the sunlight struck the glass on the curved lakefront side of the house in such a way that it seemed magnified as it hit the patio, producing a discomfort similar to Jean-Sebastien’s design flaw in the old F/S+H offices. No one, not Sharon or even Agnetha, had ever mentioned this to him.
He had designed the lake house with one image in mind: at dusk, in deepest summer, lit from inside, and this image, the way he always truly saw the house, brought him joy. In that sense, he had exceeded expectations—his own at least. It was that very image in his mind that Martin remembered now, how the sun dipped behind the pine-forest ziggurats across the lake and the evening took on a glow of latent incandescence. The magic hour: everything quietly, effortlessly stunning. The lake house, newly completed, was gorgeous, cool greens that surprised and yet seemed inevitable. Sharon was next to him, her arm around him as they sat on the patio that night hosting a dinner for the Residents Association members. He remembered the impression he had of these people, fresh from their clapboard cottages and Canadianas and what he assumed were nervous lakefront lives. He told himself several times as the evening got under way that the tone of the evening had to be just right—the last thing this gathering should be was a celebration for having won a zoning battle. It had to be a gesture—conciliatory and at the same time gently justifying—to those who were still not convinced that the right party was victorious.
He could remember so vividly the other women at the party: a cluster of lakeside doyennes and their monumental spouses, the clique of legacy lakesiders who had nothing to prove and ruled from a distance like a well-tanned politburo. This group was offset by another category of female guest, and whether it was new money or fewer than four generations on the lake, these women—only slightly older than Sharon and Martin—struck him as oscillating with the energy of striving for some urgent yet mysterious goal. Their silent, sullen husbands—temporarily exiled from their centre-ville fiefdoms and temporarily banned by their wives from the nearest golf course—followed a step behind like cut-rate bodyguards.
Martin considered himself wary of generalizations, but he couldn’t help but think of this group of women as a particular subspecies—the wrong word—a superspecies unto themselves: ridiculously well educated, but absented from the working world, unencumbered by the wearying demands and absurdities of daily toil. This freedom showed. They appeared to glide, float, and swivel, as if carried on some invisible mechanism, every sequence of movement a practiced and elegant coiling and uncoiling of a yoga-honed carriage. Anglophone and francophone, they mingled freely, as though it was clear to all that they were above the menial divisions of language. They even stood differently than Sharon, who, in her posture, seemed to carry the burden of cumulative night shifts in the emergency room, of responsibilities not of her own choosing.
He had seen what a mistake it was to underestimate them—away from the lake, they ran their households, kept their power-broker husbands at heel, and fanned out across the city to impose their will on whatever arts or charity group they chose, and with their attentions not divided by work or the day-to-day routines of children, they brought an unnerving focus to their pursuits. One guest mentioned she had begun serving on the board of an art gallery, describing the group dynamics and her fellow board members in such a way that he was certain a bloodless coup was already under way. Another, who had obviously never had to deal personally with the damage a raccoon can do to a house, spearheaded a program to “rescue and repatriate” wild animals, which would no doubt leave them all
picking up shredded garbage and skidding on droppings for generations to come. A third, who appeared at his shoulder in a one-piece tennis dress whose shade of red should have been visible to forest rangers in Trois-Rivières, told him in an effortless first sentence of introduction that she was on the Historic Buildings Committee for the city of Montreal and mentioned the dean of architecture by his childhood nickname. Martin nodded politely, all the while admitting to, and reviewing in his mind the reasons for, a certain disdain for these women. Part of it was a class thing, he thought, an admittedly less than completely fair proletarian sneer at their unabashed wealth and voluntary uselessness, but most of his antipathy came from firsthand knowledge of having had to deal with their never-ending demands as clients and coming to understand that the grief they brought to those whose services they retained was rarely worth the commission.
But this night brought a revelation: Tonight, these women seemed different. Maybe, he thought as he listened to them converse about Lyme disease awareness and Nova Scotia duck tolling retrievers, it was how they seemed to regard his work, the occasional glimpses of softness in their eyes when they looked up at his building. That was the only word for it, softness. It was a response that he knew was a sort of resignation, an acknowledgment, and it gave him pleasure in a way that had been, up until that moment, unfamiliar to him. It was an expression that not even Sharon had when she looked at her own house.
