Fearless (8 page)
As always, under pressure, Jeff didn’t contribute to the work. He chose instead to fight bitterly with his wife in the evenings and to spend his day at the office placing make-up phone calls. After a week of that he caught a cold and had to go home early to prevent it from becoming much worse. When Jeff finally did put time in, he made elementary errors which required redrafting, no matter what one thought of the concept. In short, by the time Jeff had overcome all his difficulties and announced he was ready to “pull an all-nighter” so they could meet Nutty Nick’s deadline, Max was finished with a complete plan.
“No need,” Max said and showed him blueprints with Jeff’s name listed as co-designer.
Jeff was generous in his praise of Max’s work and he had a suggestion about inventory storage that, although minor, was neat, impressive, and even inexpensive. Jeff seemed unembarrassed to have contributed so little. Perhaps that was because, as Jeff never tired of reminding Max, his socializing had gotten them this opportunity in the first place. A year ago, at his country club on Long Island, Jeff met Nutty Nick’s accountant and got the assignment to renovate a Nutty Nick branch in Great Neck. Max’s work on that minor job so impressed the boss in LA that they were given this chance.
But it was
my
work on the store in Great Neck, Max said to the Sheraton mirror. You spent that whole month arguing with your wife.
“You want us to get turned down, is that it? You want to fail? That why you’re dressing this way?” Jeff had taunted him as they entered Newark airport.
“He’s hiring architects, not salesmen. These nouveau riche businessmen want to think they’ve hired an eccentric, an artist. That makes them a patron. Suddenly he’s not Nutty Nick interviewing second-rate architects, he’s David Rockefeller hiring I. M. Pei.”
Jeff had blinked, rolling the lids down over his bulging eyes, as if what Max had said was too ugly to see. He said mildly: “We’re not second-rate.”
Max was alone in the room once this memory stopped its replay. More alone than he had been before. He was absent Jeff and also absent the desire to finish their business.
He sat down and considered how he felt.
He felt pursued.
So he ran. He left the room less than an hour after renting it.
The crash’s activity had spilled into the Sheraton’s lobby. A group of men who had helped in the rescue efforts stood around a fake stone fireplace telling a few of the hotel staff what they had done and the gruesome sights they had seen.
Max waited at the front desk behind a television crew who were loaded with equipment. A reporter, or at least me only one in a suit, told the desk clerk they were from ABC.
“National news?” the clerk said with a hush in his voice.
But the clerk got no answer since the network reporter, overhearing the rescuers’ talk of the crash, had drifted in their direction.
“I need to rent a car,” Max said to the awed and distracted clerk.
The reporter gestured to his crew to start shooting while he interviewed the rescuers. They answered eagerly. A camera appeared and was pointed at the storytellers.
“Excuse me,” Max said to the clerk.
“What?” The clerk had contorted his position behind the desk to put himself in the background of the cameraman’s shot.
“My car’s going to be in the shop for two days. Where can I rent a car?”
“The mall,” the clerk said and pointed behind him.
Max left without checking out. They had an impression of his credit card anyway.
The car rental was a glass room set by itself in the middle of the mall’s parking lot. The agent, a skinny red-haired girl, probably a high school student doing a summer job, asked him: “Is something going on at the airport? My boyfriend drove by and shouted that he heard a plane had crashed.”
“I don’t know,” Max said, wishing to make sure his business was transacted without conversation.
Unfortunately she got a phone call while writing up Max’s agreement form. “No shit,” she said to the receiver and then apologized for her obscenity with a look. “A jet’s crashed at the airport,” she explained. “No. A customer,” she said to the phone. “Oh my God,” she gasped, hearing a horrific detail. Her pen was idle. The paperwork lay half-done underneath.
“I’m in a hurry,” Max said softly.
She ignored him. She had paled at another ghastly item. Her face went slack. “Really? I’m never getting on a plane. I swear to—”
Max knocked on the counter, rapping it hard until she looked at him. “Fill out the form and call him back. I’m in a hurry.”
She stared at him, in dumb outrage.
“Please,” he said.
“Yeah…” she drawled sarcastically to the phone. “Story of my life. I’ll call you back.” She put the point of her pen on the form and demanded angrily: “You want insurance?”
The question reverberated for him. He couldn’t answer right away.
“I thought you said you were in a hurry. You want insurance?”
Max smiled. “No,” he said. There were tears in his eyes even though his mouth was spread wide in a goofy grin.
“That means you’re responsible for any damage to the car.”
Everything seemed to be chock-full of ironies. “I’m responsible,” Max said and he let out a laugh. It sounded loud and a little deranged.
“Okay,” she said and now hurried, obviously leery of him.
He took what she had available, which was a small white Ford, not glamorous or fun to drive. He was thrilled to control it, however.
He studied the map the redhead had included in the envelope containing his rental agreement. He understood it with ease. That was unlike him. Usually maps blurred into incomprehensibility, service roads melting into freeways, turnpikes becoming rivers, huge urban centers disappearing; and what he could decipher inspired little confidence: he worried that what he thought he understood would inevitably turn out to be wrong in the greater reality of the road. It was embarrassing, he thought, for an architect to have so much trouble reading a blueprint of the earth’s surface design.
Not this time. He found the interstate just where the map said it would be and he got on. His heart soared at the sight of the almost empty road. He put the air-conditioning on high, was pleased to discover that the previous renter had tuned the radio to a rock station, and flattened the gas pedal, delighted by a novelty: the speedometer readout was in digital numbers. He watched the old numbers blip off, the new numbers blip on, seventy, eighty, higher and higher, until he was driving into strange territory going faster than he had ever gone before.
Max saw that death was everywhere, had been everywhere all along, only he hadn’t seen it as death. On the highway he passed four cemeteries and a car being towed from an accident that was probably fatal. He noticed the stains of several recently killed animals on the pavement; and there was the corpse of one, lying gray and squashed, on the road’s shoulder.
He laughed when, after driving east for a little more than two hours, he saw this sign:
WELCOME TO PITTSBURGH
. He had gone to college at Carnegie-Mellon and at age seventeen the same words, maybe even the same sign, had always made him laugh, especially because Carnegie-Mellon’s location was the best argument against enrollment. “Pittsburgh is the asshole of the United States,” his Uncle Sol had commented when Max announced his intention to go there.
Recently Max had read that Pittsburgh was voted the most livable city in the United States by a survey. No doubt its air had benefited from the collapse of the steel industry. The article said Pittsburgh had made a particularly successful transition to a service economy, the same transformation that had become the fate of the United States generally. Max knew what that meant. It meant lots of yuppies and renovated brownstones, maybe even the same ramshackle ones that he and his friends used to rent. Actually he remembered there were plenty of great old buildings whose dilapidated utility could be converted to the current fashion of living in work spaces and working in living spaces. He could easily imagine young lawyers turning the ruined town houses into offices and the old warehouses into living lofts. Pittsburgh had always had pretensions to civilization. Even in Max’s day there had been Carnegie’s guilty and self-ennobling charities to the arts, housed in great buildings that probably looked much better without the air filled by the belching of his money machines.
Truth is, Max had liked the asshole of the United States. It was a real melting pot, where you could see steel sizzle and glow: a town of genuine production. There were workers who hated him because he was young, dirty, and free. There were students who wanted to become engineers and get ahead even if it cost them participation in the sexual revolution. He thought both groups admirable. He also liked his own kind, the students who wanted to act and take drugs; or play music and take drugs; or write plays and movies, and take drugs. And, above all, there was a higher purpose: the Vietnam War to march against, and a black population that had been taking shit for centuries and was amazed you were on their side. At least for a while. What he didn’t know, and understood now as he toured through his old campus, was that he had been in the middle of death all the while, the end of both Americas, imperial and idealistic.
Max drove to a hill only a mile from the campus where he and three buddies had rented a four-story turn-of-the-century brownstone. He pulled into a spot in front of a hydrant and looked up into the windows. The predictable had been done: root-canal therapy on the decay. The inside had been gutted and replaced with the embalming fluid of renovation: plasterboard, polyurethaned pine flooring, Thermopane windows. In what had been his bedroom he saw a young mother carry a baby across to a dresser. From his angle he guessed she was changing the infant. Her long hair was straight and brown. Her expression was intent on her chore, neither happy nor harassed.
Max had stood on the window ledge of that room twenty-one years before, high on LSD. He remembered the red face of a student who had the thankless job of being the “control” (namely the sober one) for that day of tripping. The control was flushed from the effort of holding onto Max’s legs while Max shouted back at him, “Let me go! I know that if I jump I’ll die! I’m not going to jump!”
Max laughed.
He hadn’t remembered that moment in years. That Max had died without a funeral.
He had to pee. He hadn’t since takeoff, hours ago, and although this was the first request from his bladder, the need was pressing. He went up to the door of his old quarters and pushed the white button. The sound it made was different from the old harsh buzzer. Chimes played softly in the distance. The urgency of having to urinate was delicious and brought tears to his eyes.
The young mother asked, “Who is it?” warily. She opened the door guardedly, only a crack, peering out at him.
“Excuse me. I really have to use a bathroom.” He didn’t mean to be comic, but he swayed from one foot to another, unable to stand still without releasing his bladder.
“I’m sorry,” she said and shut the door.
He peed on her steps. He didn’t blame her for keeping him out, but he had no patience, and so he unzipped and splattered the granite. She saw him do it from the window and rushed away, probably to phone the police. A man across the street stopped to watch him. In the summer heat it would smell when her young husband came home. Max had been full. Minutes seem to pass and yet it poured out of him. Max thought there was plenty of time for the cops to arrive. He imagined her report:
“There’s a man peeing on our renovated brownstone.”
The whitish gray of the granite darkened from his pee. “I’m aging you. I’m giving you a more European look,” Max said as his stream became arched, then sporadic and finally a trickle.
“That’s disgusting!” the man who had been watching from across the street yelled at him.
The young mother looked out the window again. Max stared at her as he zipped up. She jerked back at his intensity. Her brown hair fell across her face like a curtain.
“Sorry,” he said to her, mouthing the words and gesturing helplessly. He moved toward his car.
Seeing Max come in his direction, the man across the street trotted away fearfully.
A world of suspicion and cowardice, Max thought. A world without enough public bathrooms. Unvandalized bathrooms, he corrected himself. He had designed a pair for a city renovation of a small park in Brooklyn. “No nooks and crannies for muggers,” the Parks Department official advised. “And keep ledges to a minimum. Avoid anything that would encourage people to sleep or camp out.”
Max had worked to make the structure bright and airy—an outhouse with plumbing. He drew a skylight, aware that its protective cage would cast a medieval shadow; and he planned a row of windows just below the roofline that would also be marred by bars; but the extra light would keep the space open anyway. The stalls were generous, thanks to the new regulations for the benefit of the handicapped. Max also insisted that the urinals have barriers between them for privacy. Max hated public bathrooms that forced unnecessary intimacy. He remembered the shame of modest and insecure adolescence when obliged to go in public.
The city liked his design and built them. Unfortunately, both were kept locked to bar drug dealers and the homeless. If you wanted to use them you had to hunt down a ranger. Max had visited the park twice and not seen one. He wondered if anyone besides the work crews had ever used the facilities. By his second visit, the exteriors of his bathrooms were covered by a spider’s web of graffiti written in black paint. One window had been smashed somehow, despite its inaccessible height and bars.
“Frank Lloyd Wright it ain’t,” Jeff had said about the finished product. He was bitter because the city didn’t contract for more. “They think your bathrooms are too elaborate. I said: ‘What? You don’t care for the bidets?’ ”
Max didn’t laugh at the memory of Jeff’s joke. He saw Jeff’s severed head instead and felt pity for him. Jeff whined and itched and complained about everything in his life, but he had loved the world, and believed that every day held the promise of his redemption. Even if he did see redemption in the form of a long-term contract from Nutty Nick stores.