‘The cut-outs session?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh! I would have loved to see that . . .’
‘It was really . . . how to explain . . . Intelligent. Yes, there’s no other word for it, intelligent.’
‘But I heard it’s old hat now. That he did it every time.’
‘I don’t know.’
They were walking down the stairs side by side.
‘. . . but I do know he did it at least one more time, because I was there.’
‘No!’ The younger man stood still, grabbing his bag as it fell from his shoulder.
They stopped at the first bistro they happened upon, and that night Charles, for the first time in months, in years, thought back on his profession.
He told his story.
In 1999, or ten years after the ‘shock of Jussieu’, because he knew a bloke who was in the Arup engineering group, he was given a ticket to the Benaroya Hall in Seattle to see one of the best shows of his life. (Nana’s escapades notwithstanding . . .) There was not a single soloist in the spanking new auditorium, but anyone in the city who was a rich donor or a solid citizen or simply a powerful one was there that night. All along Third Avenue there were nervous exchanges on walkie-talkies and ribbons of limousines.
A few months earlier bidding had opened for the construction of a huge library. Pei and Foster had submitted their tenders, but the two projects that were selected were Steven Holl’s, and Koolhaas’s. Holl’s work was fairly banal, but he was a local lad and that could work in his favour. Buy American, so the thinking went.
Charles wasn’t telling the story so much as reliving it. He got up, spread his arms, sat back down, shoved their beers out of the way, scribbled in his notebook and explained to Marc how that genius, fifty-five years old at the time, in other words hardly much older than he was now, had managed, by presenting his project in a very theatrical way, with only a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a pair of scissors for a weapon – at times Charles would mime him, at times he would fold and display his paper cut-outs – to walk away with the trophy and a contract for a construction site that would end up costing over 270 million dollars.
‘With a simple sheet of A4, huh!’
‘Yes, I see, I see . . . 270 million for 5 grams . . .’
They ordered some omelettes, more beer, and Charles, encouraged by his student’s questions, continued to dissect the great man. Or rather to dissect how his turn of phrase, his art of concision, his taste for diagrams, his sense of humour, his vivacious wit – mockery, even – had enabled him, in less than two hours, to present a clear, intelligible vision of something extremely complex.
‘It’s the building with the irregular platforms, right?’
‘Exactly. An entire play on horizontal lines in a country that swears by the sky alone . . . You have to admit he’s got a nerve . . . Not to mention the seismic constraints and absolutely unbelievable specifications. The bloke I was telling you about, from Arup, told me they nearly went mad . . .’
‘And have you seen it finished?’
‘No. Never. But it’s not my favourite design of his anyway . . .’
‘Tell me.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Which is your favourite?’
Several hours later they were finally forced to leave, and they stood for a long while leaning on the bonnet of Marc’s car, comparing their tastes, their opinions, confronting the twenty years between them.
‘Right, I’d better get going . . . I missed dinner, but at least I can be there for breakfast . . .’
He tossed his bag in the rear and offered Charles a lift. Charles took the opportunity to ask him where his parents lived, and how far along he was in his studies, and how he had ended up in their office.
‘Because of you . . .’
‘Why because of me?’
‘I decided to do my internship there because of you.’
‘What a strange idea.’
‘Hmm. Who knows what it takes, things like this . . . I suppose I needed to learn how to repair a printer,’ quipped the shadow of his youth with a smile.
He tripped over Mathilde’s backpack in the hallway.
‘SOS dear stepdad whom I adore with all my heart, I can’t do this exercise and it’s for tomorrow (and I have to hand it in, and they mark it, and it counts towards my average) (if you see what I mean . . .)
‘ps: pleeeze, HAVE MERCY, no explanations! Just answers.
‘pss: I know, I’m asking too much but if just this once you could make an effort with your handwriting that would really be a big help.
‘psss: thanks
‘pssss: good night
‘psssss: Love ya.’
A chord of a circle is the hypotenuse of an isosceles right-angled triangle whose legs are radii of the circle. The radius of the circle is 6 times the square root of 2. What is the length of the minor arc subtended by the chord?
Easy as pissing.
And Charles, once again, sat down alone in a phantom kitchen. He opened a famished pencil case, cursed on discovering a chewed-up pencil, took out his own propelling pencil and set about his task, careful to loop his letters nicely.
In so doing, measuring the arc, subtending the chord, cutting out some tracing-paper and saving face for a very lazy young woman, he could not help but measure the abyss separating him at that moment from Rem Koolhaas . . .
He found consolation in the fact – and this went towards his mark – that he was, if nothing else, love ya’d.
He slept for a few hours, drank a coffee standing up, reread her note distractedly and added at the bottom, ‘you are too much’, without specifying whether this was in response to her last P.S. or to her outrageous behaviour.
To help her determine which of the two, he took his Staedtler out of his pocket again and placed it in among the empty ink cartridges, chewed-up biros, and little notes full of spelling mistakes.
What would become of her if I left? he wondered, pulling on his jacket.
And me? What . . .
A taxi was waiting to take him to his other duties.
‘Which terminal, did you say?’
Any one, I really couldn’t care less.
‘Sir?’
‘C,’ he replied.
And again,
And again,
The meter ticking.
10
THE TRAFFIC JAMS were Dantean . . . Dostoyevskian. It took them nearly four hours to cover thirty-odd kilometres; they witnessed two serious accidents and took part in a festival of fender-bending.
They set off into the oncoming traffic, insulting whoever had a problem with that; they drove along the verge with the windows rolled up because of the dust; they bounced out of spectacular potholes and shoved the smaller vehicles out of the way by giving them a taste of Western manufactured bumpers.
They’d even have driven over the injured if they could have.
His driver pointed first to the pavement and then to the windscreen wiper lever, and his joke seemed to amuse him so highly that Charles made an effort to understand his jargon. It is for blood, he guffawed, understand? Blood! Krov! Ha, ha. Good joke.
The air was stifling, the pollution extreme, and Charles’s migraine kept him from concentrating on the appointments lined up for the following day. He gulped down his packets of powder, running his tongue over his gums to accelerate the effect of the aspirin. In the end he let his files slip to his feet.
Come on . . . Let him switch on his bloody wipers and let’s get this over with . . .
When at last Viktor wished him a good night in front of the hotel’s bouncers Charles was incapable of reacting.
‘Bla bla chto zhaluytyess?’
His passenger looked down.
‘Bla bla bla galodyen?’
He let go of the door handle.
‘Myi staboy bla bla bla vodki!’ he decreed, pulling away from the kerb.
His smile illuminated the rear view mirror.
*
They set off la
ter into streets that grew ever darker, and when their limo began to seem too provocative, they entrusted it to a gang of delighted kids. Viktor gave his instructions, waved his big hand as if to spank them, showed them a wad of notes that he hastily restored to his pocket, and left them with a pack of cigarettes to buy their patience.
Charles drank one glass, then a second one, began to relax, time for a third . . . and woke up at dawn not far from the portable site office. There was a total black hole between ‘third’ and the snoring on the headrest next to him.
Never had his own breath given him such cause for . . . consternation.
The light was pounding his skull. He staggered to the pump, rinsed off, let his hangover swell up and explode, vomited as he stood up straight, then started all over.
No need to leaf through his phrasebook to understand that Totor was taking the piss.
Finally Viktor took pity on him and handed him a bottle.
‘Drink, my friend! Drink!’ he said, in French.
Well, well . . . His first words in French. It would seem the night had been merrily multilingual.
Charles obeyed and . . .
‘Spasiba daragoy! Vkusna!’
That perked him up, all right.
A few hours later he was calling Pavlovich a rotten bastard in the original before taking him in his arms for a bear hug.
He’d made it, he was Russian now.
He began to sober up at the airport while he was trying to reread his, er, notes and recovered the rest of his wits when Philippe called to give him hell.
‘Hey, I’ve just had Becker’s informer on the line . . . What’s this bloody mess with the shoring towers over at the B-1? Good lord, don’t you realize how much money we’re losing every day with this? Don’t you realize –’
Charles held the receiver away from his ear and looked at it warily. Mathilde, who in other respects didn’t care a fig, was forever harping on about how the thing was full of carcinogenic dangers. ‘I swear! It’s as bad as the microwave!’ Oh God, he thought, closing his fist to protect himself from his partner’s sputtering, she might be right . . .
He opened the book at random, without ado bought seventeen stallions from a retired cavalry officer who had splendid animals, a carpet-making workshop, liqueurs that were over a century old, and vintage Tokay; and then he accompanied Nikolay Rostov to the ball held by the governor of Voronezh.
Together with Nikolay he waylaid a plump and pretty blonde, and showered her with ‘mythological’ compliments.
When her husband started walking towards them, he got to his feet abruptly. Obeyed orders, showed his boarding pass, took off his belt, his boots, his sabre, and his frock coat, and piled them in the plastic tray.
He set off the alarm for no reason, and was taken to one side to be frisked.
Ah, these Frenchmen, grumbled Nikita Ivanich, pinching the nape of his wife’s neck, they’re really all the same . . .
11
NO MATTER HOW much he fasted, refrained from drinking, dissolved his liver in effervescent tablets, rubbed his temples, massaged his eyelids, closed the shutters and aimed the lamp the other way, the effects of his unforgettable bender refused to dissipate.
Getting dressed, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, remaining silent, thinking – all of it felt like a huge burden.
From time to time a nasty word crossed his mind. Three syllables. Three syllables taking him in their grip and . . . No. Quiet. You can do better than that. Lose some more weight and you’ll wriggle your way out of this shit. It’s not your style. You haven’t the time, anyway. Get a move on.
Swim, or sink if you have to, but get a move on.
Soon it would be summer; the days had never seemed so long, and the aforementioned list of activities continued, a constant litany to the rhythm of verbs in the simple past tense. (Simple past, remember, is used to describe a one-time action, without taking continuous action or duration into account; expression of actions in succession.) He was, he could, he had to. He did, he said, he came clean. He went, watched, decided.
He withstood, he got.
He got, from a doctor’s surgery, an appointment outside normal consulting hours.
He undressed, they weighed him. They checked his throat, his pulse, his lungs. They asked him about his hearing, his eyesight. They asked him to be more specific. Was it local, frontal, occipital, spinal, congenital, viral, dental, matinal, general? Was it . . .
‘Enough to have me climbing the walls,’ interrupted Charles.
They wrote out a prescription with a sigh: ‘I can’t find anything. Stress, perhaps?’ Then, looking up, ‘Tell me, Sir, do you have any worries at the moment?’
Danger. Danger, flashed his last remaining defences. Keep going, I said.
‘No.’
‘Insomnia?’
‘Rarely.’
‘Right. I’ve prescribed some anti-inflammatory medication but if you don’t feel better in a few weeks, you should come back for a scan.’
Charles didn’t budge. He merely wondered, while hunting for his cheque book, whether a scan would know how to detect a lie.
And fatigue . . . and memories . . .
Friendship betrayed, old ladies emasculated in public toilets, cemeteries by railway lines, the humiliating tenderness of a woman to whom he had not known how to give pleasure, kind words in exchange for good marks, or even those thousands of tonnes of steel framework in the Moscow oblast that would probably never support a single thing.
Worries? Not him. An excess of lucidity, at best.
At home, the atmosphere was highly charged. Laurence was preparing for the sale season (or a new week of fashion shows, he hadn’t heard properly), and Mathilde was packing her bags. She was flying off to Scotland the following week, ‘to improve’, she said in English, and then she would go to join her cousins on the coast in the Basque country.
‘And your diploma?’
‘I’m working on it, all right?’ she retorted, inscribing long arabesques in the margins of her workbook. ‘I’m revising my stylistic devices, here.’
‘I can see that. Art nouveau style, I’d say, no?’
They were supposed to meet up with Mathilde at the beginning of August and spend a week together before dropping her off at her father’s. After that, he didn’t know. There had been talk of Tuscany, but Laurence had not mentioned it again, and Charles no longer dared bring up the subject of Siena and cypress trees.
The idea of sharing a villa with some people he had only met a few weeks earlier, during an interminable dinner at his sister-in-law’s gilt and marble henhouse, was anything but tempting.
‘Well? What do you think of them?’ Laurence had asked on the way home.
‘Predictable.’
‘Naturally . . .’
Her ‘naturally’ was very weary, but what else was he supposed to say?
Vulgar?
No. He couldn’t . . . It was too late, his bed was still too far away and this discussion was too . . . no.
Perhaps he should have said ‘provident’ instead? They had spent a lot of time talking about tax exemption . . . Yes . . . Perhaps . . . The silence in the car would not have been so heavy.
Charles didn’t like the summer holidays.
Going away, yet again, shirts off the hangers, close the suitcase, choose, count, sacrifice some books, eat up the miles, find oneself forced to live in hideous holiday rentals, or yet again in hotel corridors with towels that smelled of industrial laundries, bask in the sun for a few days, then say, aah, at last, try to believe in it, and then . . . get bored.
What he liked were the escapades, the things you did on the spur of the moment, the week suddenly broken up. The pretext of an appointment outside Paris, getting lost miles off the motorways.
The Cheval Blanc inns where the chef’s talents made up for the hideousness of the décor. World capitals. Their stations, markets, rivers, history, architecture. Deserted museums between two meetings, villages barely on th
e map, embankments without views and cafés without terraces. To see it all without ever being a tourist. And never masquerade as one again, that would be something.
The word ‘holidays’ had meant something when Mathilde was little and together they would win the prize for best sand castle in the entire world. How many Babylons had he built between two tides in those days . . . How many Taj Mahals for baby crabs . . . All the sunburn on the back of his neck, the comments, the seashells and frosted chips of glass . . . How many plates shoved back so a drawing could take shape on the paper tablecloth, how many tricks to get the mum to sleep without waking the daughter, and indolent breakfasts where all he wanted to do was to sketch the two of them without leaving any crumbs in his sketchbook.
And all those watercolours . . . how well the paint used to mix beneath his fingers.
Such a long time ago.
*
‘There’s a Madame Béramiand who’s been trying to get hold of you.’
Charles was sorting the day’s mail. Their tender for the head-quarters of Borgen & Finker in Lausanne had not been selected.
A lead weight came down upon his shoulders.
Two lines. No rhyme, no reason. Nothing to justify the disgrace.
The closing salutation was longer than their dismissal.
He dropped the letter onto his assistant’s desk: ‘To be filed.’
‘Shall I make copies for the others?’
‘If you’re up for it, Barbara, if you’re up for it . . . But I must confess that in this case . . .’
Hundreds, thousands of hours of work had just gone up in smoke. And beneath the ashes, investments, losses, funds, banks, financial arrangements, upcoming negotiations, rates to calculate, energy.
The sort of energy he no longer had.
He’d already walked away when she added, ‘And what shall I do about this woman, then?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Béram—’
‘Why’s she calling?’
‘I didn’t quite understand . . . Something personal.’
Charles scoffed at her last word with an irritated gesture.
‘Same. File it.’
He didn’t go down for lunch.
When one project fell through, a new one had to start up right away: the ultimate conviction of a profession that had undermined all other convictions. Anything, anything at all. A temple, a zoo, his own cage if nothing else turned up, but one idea, one stroke of the pencil, and you were saved.