A Place of My Own (29 page)

I sat for a while on the step waiting for the rain to subside, watching it strafe the surface of the pond and fall from the eaves in sheets. I think I enjoyed this rain as much as any I’ve been in, listening to it tattoo the shingles overhead, producing an agreeable clatter. Drop by drop it was testifying to the soundness of my roof, reason enough to like it, but there was also the way the din seemed to underscore the ceiling’s beauty, the ear drawing the eye up into the rafters, into that complicated weave of wood and work and meaning that Charlie had dreamed up and Joe and I had actually made.

I especially liked the way the lucid geometry of rafters and lath set off the rough chiaroscuro of shingles, the one so very human in its order and the other so reminiscent of tree bark and fish scales, forest canopies and fields, of nature working in her best
e pluribus
unum
mode, fashioning something of beauty and consequence from simple slips of wood, leaves, blades of grass, and shadows. The juxtaposition of geometry and variousness set up a rhythm that was pleasing to the eye. It also brought out the character of the different woods, the long, legible grain of the fir throwing into relief the furriness of cedar, and this along with the visual rhythm gave my roof an almost emphatic Hereness.

Present
it most certainly seemed to be. And yet at the same time the ceiling seemed to
re-present
too, offering up its allusions to boat hulls and leaf canopies, tree houses and classical dentils, a web of allusion fully as complex and layered as the weave of its wood and workmanship. So which was it, Here or There? Not either/or, I decided, but
both:
Here
and
There, shelter and symbol, nature and culture at once. And then it occurred to me, as I gazed out at the view down toward my arbor, just then draped in the velvety purple vestments of a
clematis jackmanii
, that a building was probably less like a text than a garden. For it is the garden that manages, in a way that few things in this life do, to celebrate the here and now (with its full complement of sensory satisfactions) while at the same time summoning the there and then by means of its symbolism. The garden’s mode is not metaphor exactly—one thing for another—but something else: one thing
and
another. Unlike a painting of a landscape, say, or a poem about nature, behind which stands nothing but pigment or marks on a page, the garden offers us an experience whose power does not depend on codes or conventions or even the suspension of disbelief, though all those things are at work here too, making the experience that much richer.

So, I guess you could say I liked my roof well enough. Already it had proven itself capable not only of keeping the rain off my head, which you’ll have to take my word for, but also of housing the farflung speculations of its builder, whose soundness you can judge for yourself. Thoreau regretted he hadn’t put a somewhat bigger and higher roof over his head at Walden, since “you want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port…Our sentences [want] room to unfold.” My roof, my place, promised at least that much: to offer a decent habitation for my thoughts. But something more too, something specific to my life and perhaps my times as well. Out there in this new room of mine, dryly enjoying the summer rain with its fine tang of ozone, it seemed just the place to sit and compose a word or two on behalf of the sights and sounds and senses of this, our still undigitized world.

By the time Joe and I headed into the second winter of construction, our work together, even though it amounted to something less than one day a week, had acquired its own particular rhythms and textures and talk. Joe reveled in playing the role of mentor to my eager if still-somewhat maladroit apprentice, except for the occasional period of sulking, when he would temporarily revert to sullen clock-puncher. These episodes were invariably occasioned by a suggestion from me that we should perhaps consult the blueprints before undertaking framing a window opening or hanging a door. “You mean the funny papers,” Joe’d grumble. “Well, you’re the boss,” he’d shrug, egging me to take control, or sides; I never was quite sure which. But in time such episodes became more rare, for as my own confidence as a carpenter grew, I was less inclined to regard Charlie’s drawings as revealed truth, much to Joe’s satisfaction.

Working outside in the brief, chill days of December had a way of hurrying this process along. Architectural plans look different in the cold, especially when you’re rocking stiffly from boot to boot on top of fossilized mud, dispatching neural messages to toes and fingertips that go unheeded, and struggling to interpret lines on a drawing that only seem more ambiguous the harder you stare at them.
Joe, can you see any framing to hold up that window? Nope, not a stick. Looks like he wants us to levitate this one
. Under such circumstances the solidarity of carpenters is bound to intensify. After a while you can’t look at the blueprints—which by now have had their pristine geometries smudged by a parade of muddy thumbs—without thinking about the comfortable office in which they were drawn, the central heating and scrubbed fingernails and steaming pots of coffee. Such images had a way of magnifying any lapses in the architect’s renderings into affronts, any peculiarities of design into definitive proof of the woolly-headedness of the professional classes that do their work indoors. A class to which, it was true, I’d be returning myself first thing Monday, but for the time being my allegiance was to the double-gloved, triple-socked, shivering and quick-to-get pissed-off outdoor crew.

It was an allegiance I found myself compelled to declare late one December afternoon, to Joe’s unbounded delight. He had casually called my attention to a notation on the drawings that specified pine, of all things, for the piece of wood that framed the recessed rock window on the building’s north exterior wall. It never occurred to me this might be some sort of a test, but I passed it just the same. “Fuck that,” I said, surprising myself almost as much as Joe. Pine was a dumb idea on several counts: the shady north side promised to be perpetually damp (pine has no rot resistance to speak of) and every single other piece of exposed exterior lumber—from the roofing shingles to the trim—was cedar, of which we happened to have several beautiful lengths left. “We’re going to use one-inch clear cedar there, I don’t care what the drawings say,” I announced, and Joe erupted. “
Yes!
You’ve finally got it!” he shouted, launching into a gleeful little end-zone dance in the snow. “Mike, I have been waiting an entire year to hear you speak those fine words. Charlie’s down…he’s
out
!”

But sometimes Joe could take the Professor Higgins act a little too far. Probably because I’d proven such a willing pupil in matters of carpentry, Joe eventually began to think there might be other areas in which I stood to benefit from his instruction, and I soon found myself on the receiving end of lengthy lectures about child rearing, television, economics, and politics. I wouldn’t have minded this too much, conversation being one of carpentry’s best perks, except that Joe had a habit of stopping whatever job he was doing in advance of making a point and then forestalling its resumption until I had more or less conceded the wisdom of his argument. When we got to gun control—and sooner or later we always got to gun control—work all but ground to a halt.

I knew politics were on tap whenever Joe’d pop his hammer into its holster, rear back on his heels, and then lean forward punching the air with his index finger. Power tools silenced, the woods would ring with his rhetorical question: “Mike, do you want to know what’s really wrong with this country?” Whether the abomination of the day was crime or immigration or free trade or the varieties of idiocy regnant in Washington and Hartford, the monologue would somehow or other and often quite ingeniously wend its way back to the mother subject of gun control. The precise route we would travel from here to there I never could quite reconstruct—the transitions could be dazzling—but get there we would, and before it was all over I’d be treated to a soaring peroration from some Second Amendment deity whom he’d then challenge me to identify.

“‘Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops…’”

“Jefferson?”

“Guess again.”

“Tom Paine?”

“
Wrong
. Noah Webster, 1787. I thought you said you went to college.”

The jurisprudence of the Second Amendment was Joe’s specialty; no other amendment (and least of all numbers four, five, and eight) elicited the same fervent devotion. (Indeed, he believed that the solution to the crime problem involved crueler and more unusual punishment.) Joe was not himself a serious hunter, but he collected guns and knew an astounding amount about their history and technology, their lore and care and proper handling. Any time we heard the report of a hunter’s rifle, he would stop to announce the caliber of the gun in question and then proceed to enumerate its salient virtues and limitations. Joe was convinced that if I would only learn more about guns, I would not be so quick to endorse ignorant measures like the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban—which anyone with any sense at all and about $50 worth of mail-order parts could
easily
circumvent, and which—was I aware of this?—specifically exempted assault weapons manufactured by the Israelis. Joe left me with back issues of
Shotgun News
and all manner of NRA propaganda; once he presented me with a bullet of some advanced design that allowed it to travel just under the speed of sound so as not to make a sonic boom.

Like many people who regard gun control as the preeminent threat to our liberties, Joe’s politics occasionally shaded off into areas you really didn’t care to visit, the kind of places where the fantasies of Oliver Stone and the militia movement begin to fuzz together. I’m not entirely sure, though, whether it was the arrayed forces of conspiracy or stupidity that Joe deemed the greater threat; nor was I sure which offered safer conversational ground. Joe and I could just about agree on the folly of free trade or the perfidy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, but when he’d start in on his theories of evolution—how people are growing progressively more stupid because technology and the welfare state are interfering with the proper functioning of natural selection—I worked hard to steer him back to the relative safety of the Bill of Rights or, best and most benign of all, the perversity of architects.

On this last theme, Joe and I had lately found a broad stretch of common ground. We had coined a term that we hauled out regularly to damn anything in Charlie’s plans that in our estimation defied practicality or common sense: “Eight-one.” It was sort of like the cop’s “ten-four,” or the short-order cook’s “eighty-six.” The pine window trim was an eight-one, so was its thin-air framing; in fact, the windows taken as a whole were one great big eight-one, since they were designed, as windows in the real world very seldom are, to open inward rather than out. This and a few other details about their design meant the windows could not be ordered out of a catalog but would have to be custom-made at considerable expense. “Custom” would be a very generous translation of our “eight-one.”

Why “eight-one”? The term derived from the 8?1? height Charlie had specified for the walls in the main part of the building, a dimension calculated to offend every fiber in the body of any self-respecting carpenter. Lumber comes in standard even-numbered lengths; two-by-fours are either eight, ten, or twelve feet long, and plywood sheets come four by eight. Indeed, eight feet is virtually the common denominator of American construction, going all the way back to the standard dimension of a bay in Colonial houses and barns; ever since, the number eight has been one of the more prestigious integers in carpentry. In order to make all the 8?1? two-by-fours and lengths of plywood we would need to complete our walls and fin walls, a tremendous amount of wood would have to be wasted, not to mention sawing time, and, to a carpenter, waste is one of the forms poor craftsmanship takes. Whatever the architectural logic that dictated designing a wall one inch off of such a canonical dimension, to a carpenter it represented sheer perversity, a slap in the face of tradition, common sense, and frugality. Indeed you could argue—and believe me, Joe did—Charlie’s eight-one summed up everything that was wrong with the practice of architecture in America today.

I remembered once reading a story in
Fine Homebuilding
, the magazine for carpenters and serious do-it-your-selfers, about a contractor who had grown so sick of performing what he regarded as needlessly “custom” work for architects that, when the time came to design a house for himself, he made sure that every last piece of wood in it would be a standard dimension, the overwhelming majority of them eight feet. The ceilings were eight feet, the floor plan of every story and room was a multiple of eight, and all the windows and door openings were a simple fraction of eight. This fellow bragged of the fact that not only had he designed his house without an architect, but he had been able to more or less frame it without using a saw. But what made him proudest of all was that not a single piece of framing lumber had gone to waste.

“And have you actually
seen
this house?” Charlie demanded to know when I told him the story. He was in town checking on another job, and had stopped by at the end of the day to go over a couple of problems that had cropped up in the plans. Joe and I’d been giving him a hard time about the eight-one walls and the in-swinging windows, the full scope of whose difficulty—their radical customness—having just sailed into view. The day before, I’d taken Charlie’s drawings to a millworker who’d informed me that not only would the windows as drawn cost several thousand dollars to fabricate, but that he couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t leak. I intended to get around to this before Charlie left town.

“Because my guess is that this Mister Eight-Oh of yours lives in one god-awful box. Oh sure, nobody actually
needs
an architect, if all you want is shelter, a dry box to work in. But you wanted something more.”

True enough, but surely architecture doesn’t require eight-one walls.

“Actually, I would argue that sometimes it does.” Charlie was clearly ready for us this time, and in no mood to let a pair of cranky weekend carpenters trash his profession. Charlie had come from a meeting on a new job he’d landed nearby; he was wearing his country-client attire, a graph-paper-checked shirt, chinos, and a sweater vest that together managed deftly to say to the client: informal yet billable. (Thankfully Charlie had taken my own job off the clock several months earlier, after I’d made some noises about the magnitude of the initial design fees.)

Charlie reached into the rank of pens lining his breast pocket. Taking a black Expresso Bold to our smeary copy of the blueprint, he proceeded to demonstrate how he’d arrived at the eight-one dimension, a complex puzzle revolving around the need to keep both the height of the door and the building’s distance from the ground at a bare minimum. “One inch less in that wall and the doorjamb on the landing would be grazing your head. I suppose I could have raised the lower floor an inch, like so, but then the front elevation starts to float—not good. And when I start
adding
inches to the height of the wall, entering the building isn’t nearly so nice—you lose that neat transition from low, tight doorway into big space.
Way
too ordinary.” It was reassuring to know that eight-one hadn’t been an oversight. But I didn’t buy that raising the floor one inch would have ruined the elevation.

“And by the way,” Charlie continued, hoisting his bushy eyebrows over an expression of mock injury, “the term ‘custom’ is a much friendlier way to describe what I do than this rude ‘eight-one’ business.”

Charlie’s disdain for the “way too ordinary” reminded me of a definition Le Corbusier had once proposed for architecture. Architecture, Le Corbusier had declared, is when the windows are either too big or too small, but never the “right” size. For when the window is the right size, the building is…just a building. Viewed from one perspective, Le Corbusier’s dictum is as succinct a confession of artistic arrogance as you could ask for, implying as it did that originality, if not eccentricity, was an end in itself. Architecture as the wrong-size window is precisely what had sent Mister Eight-Oh around the bend—and what made his radically stock response seem at least partly sane.

And yet, as Charlie was suggesting, where would you rather spend the afternoon? In the Villa Savoye, or Mr. Eight-Oh’s House of the Standard Dimensions? “Any building that’s trying not just to give shelter but to move us—to raise our spirits—is bound to break with our expectations in all sorts of ways,” Charlie said. “Sometimes you have to italicize a door or a window in order to make people see it freshly, and that might very well mean making it ‘too big’ or ‘too small.’ The fact is, your Mister Eight-Oh may have saved himself some trouble and some dough, but he’s missing out on the soul of a good building.”

Joe now tried to reel the conversation back down to earth, where he hoped to pick up some needed information and then with any luck call it a day.

“I hear what you’re saying about seeing things fresh, Charlie. But there are a couple things in these drawings of yours we can’t see
at all—
like the framing for this little rock window here. Sometimes Mike forgets to rub the lemon juice on these things and we can’t read the invisible ink.”