The Glass Harmonica (40 page)

35
McKay Street

DENNIS CONNERS

FEBRUARY 11, 2006

F
UCKED
. That was the way Dennis thought about the entire day. It was fucked from beginning to end. And there was no other way to describe it.

He'd been in early for a meeting where—clearly—no one liked anything he had suggested, where they all just looked on impassively when he'd taken the drawings out of their big blue cardboard tubes and unrolled them on the conference room table.

He should have known he was in trouble when the drawings started to roll up on themselves again and no one even moved to help him hold them down. He'd built a ramshackle construction of staplers and tape dispensers on every corner, and the diagrams had finally stayed flat, but Dennis could tell that they had decided to hate the concept, that no one was even trying to see what he had designed. It was as if they had gotten together ahead of time and agreed between themselves that they would reject them on principle. “Builds some character”—isn't that what coaches say when someone smacks you in the face? Dennis thought. It was in the way they all had their hands up around their faces, and also the fact that no one would look at him. Like they'd all simultaneously developed an allergy to meeting his gaze.

Ted, who owned the firm, had given him a dismissive pat on the shoulder at the end of his presentation, a pat that felt like “Good try, but it just doesn't measure up,” and no one else in the room had even been able to get a word out. He was sure there was a simple reason why they'd disliked the work, but no one would give him a hint about what it might be. Only a simple plan for a gazebo, a glassed-in octagon, but the whole room had seemed to give off a gas that said, “You're not good enough.”

So Dennis had gone to the food court for a club sandwich and fries at ten-thirty in the morning, a double side of gravy, and the woman at the counter smiled when he passed her a ten. That's the first smile I've seen today, Dennis thought, eating the sandwich without even enjoying it, the rough surface of the toast carving up the roof of his mouth. And the gravy didn't do anything to lift the gloom, the food court empty enough that every sound was a brittle plastic slap.

Dennis wondered how he had ever ended up in St. John's, except he knew perfectly well: he'd answered a newspaper ad looking for “an associate for a mid-sized architectural practice,” and more than anything else, he'd fallen in love with the building the firm was in. It was all old timber work inside, a redone warehouse, and he'd liked the way the beams had been sandblasted clear of paint so that you could see every join and angle, so that the whole inside of the building seemed as easily put together as a tree house but with massive beams almost a foot across on each face. It was brand new, released from all old, a combination that you couldn't build from the ground up now if you set out to do exactly that, he thought.

But the work he had ended up doing, once he got the job, was nowhere near as enthralling. It was a job, Dennis thought, and that was about the best face he could put on it. It was a job, and it paid the bills, even if it wasn't anything close to what he had thought it would be.

In his mind, moving to a small east coast city was supposed to have been his entry into something like Frank Lloyd Wright and big glass triangles, purpose-built brilliant houses with rooms that made customers weak. He was supposed to bring a whole new world to people who had never seen anything like that before. At least, that's what he'd thought. Every job was supposed to be something dramatically new: a challenge, something that would require Dennis to turn his mind on edge or sideways, and think about moving in a different direction to solve a difficult problem. Architecture had always been like that in school: there had been plenty of time spent on the basics, but there were always the big projects to look forward to, the conceptual work that was all about angles and air and light, the solutions for clients with plenty of money and enough guts to want something clearly different.

He hadn't expected to wind up calculating the load on two-by-six supports for someone else's designs, hadn't planned on being given work drawing up small extensions and glassed-in sunrooms while the other architects with the firm designed houses with timber-framed great rooms and office complexes with centre courts large enough for fully grown trees. Dennis had been involved, all right: they'd let him calculate the likely weight of the tree and the size of floor joists they'd need under it, and he'd spent enough of his time building scale models of buildings. But when it came time to meet with the clients, Dennis was almost always outside the boardroom, sent off to work on the sort of small project that kept steady money coming in for the firm. “There are the occasional projects that build the franchise, and then there are the Wal-Mart customers who keep the doors open and the cash register filling up,” Ted told him. And Dennis was sure that he was the one who spent the most time working in the Wal-Mart end of the practice.

“Pay your dues, Dennis,” they were fond of saying, and they would always say it with a smile, as if it was some rite of passage that he was supposed to just put up with. “Some projects build reputation, others build cash flow, and you're on the cash-flow beat right now.”

Other people did the designs while he filled in the dimensions on the beams in load-bearing walls and non-load-bearing walls—fine, even notations with hard-lead pencils, every word and number underlined with a careful stroke perfectly made with the help of a plastic straightedge, and that was supposed to be enough to keep him content.

Dennis couldn't help thinking that he hadn't come all the way from Toronto for a job filling in everybody else's blanks. Back at home, though, he had a secret.

Upstairs in the front room at 35 McKay Street, he'd converted an entire bedroom into a drawing room. Curtains, a drawing table, a tall stool. He'd wanted it spartan, bare, so that nothing would be able to get in the way of his ideas, and he'd even taken up the carpet. Expensive carpet, “Berber,” the realtor had said reverentially, muttering the word like it was a religious chant when Dennis was looking at the house, but he didn't care. He didn't even want it. He'd rolled it up awkwardly, the nail strips along the edges tearing at his fingers, and the carpet and underlay were down in the basement now, the plywood subfloor slowly darkening from exposure to sunlight. At one end of the room, twin front windows, just a little too tall for the balance of the space, he thought; at the other, a fireplace, never used, completely filled with a white-painted metal cover. One ceiling light in the middle of a patterned plaster circle above him, and his gooseneck lamp craning in over the drawing table like it was someone familiar looking over his shoulder while he worked.

A portfolio, a few rolled-up pieces of work from university in their rigid cardboard tubes, and his idea. He'd had an idea, a real idea, a unique idea, and there wasn't any way he was going to give it up. If he took it to work, someone else would be sure to take credit for thinking of it first. So he kept it at home, tinkering and fine-tuning.

Laid out on the drawing table he'd bought for school was a design for a house that delicately crossed the line between traditional and modern, the kind of design that he was sure could catch on and leave a real mark. He called it the Hiding House, and the first kernel of the idea had come to him in the middle of the night, as he looked out the window at the dark windows of row houses across the street, at their constant, repeating, connected rooflines, rooflines that seemed to suggest that each house was both different and yet so similar as to be able to vanish among its compatriots.

The front of the Hiding House would be like a St. John's row house, he thought, and that was the beauty of it. Unassuming and square, it would be the kind of house even a burglar wouldn't find interesting. The idea was that the whole outside would seem nondescript as a matter of course: the windows spaced so that there were three across the front on the second floor, while there was a door on the left front corner of the ground floor and then two windows on the right. The idea was that it was two-dimensional and absolutely flat—the kind of expression, he thought, that you put on for an absolute stranger. A house like a grade-school child would draw. No—a house drawn by a grade-school student trying to blend into a new school, offering up no sharp edges, nothing distinct. No particular personality, no character at all on the facade—and that was it, he thought.
Facade
was the perfect word, because absolutely none of it would be true.

Inside, it would be completely different, the whole thing designed to let in light from odd and unexpected angles. Slanted skylights that bled light down through the flat roof, corresponding gaps down through the second floor to the first, the kitchen on the back all glass and opened up all the way to the second storey. He'd been working on it for months, toying with how the light would travel through the house as the sun moved. Inside, the idea was that the house would have everything—high-tech bathroom and kitchen, energy efficient to a T—but none of it would be revealed to someone just walking by. It was supposed to look like the kind of house you wouldn't even want to see the inside of, until you did. The kind of place you look at and wonder if you'd bother to go to an open house there—and once inside, Dennis thought, a house you'd never, ever want to leave.

He spent nights working on it, and showed his work to no one, convinced it could be his ticket to a new job and a new city. Early on, he'd called a former professor, the architect he trusted most, and told him breathlessly about the idea. There had been a long pause on the other end of the phone.

“It's a great idea, Dennis,” the professor had said. “But—”

“But what?”

“But it's an idea that's more about you than it is about the people you want to be selling it to. Most people want to stand out, want to be noticed. They want it to be obvious.”

“But it's about discovering things, about how you go inside and learn a bit more with every corner you go around,” Dennis argued. “It unfolds, and just gets better.”

“It's brilliant, Dennis. But selling it is harder. Some people like it all laid out right in front of them, so they can show off to people they wouldn't even open the door to.”

Dennis had stewed over that conversation for two nights, the lights left off in his upstairs drawing room, the pencils all in their careful rows, sharpened, all their points aligned and aimed in the same direction. And then he had started working again. Slowly at first, but with the project gathering speed again. It has to be my ticket away from this, Dennis thought. It's a good, clean, conceptual idea, ready to deliver, and it's mine—and even if no one wants to buy any of them, it's the kind of project I can take with me, the kind of thing that shows creativity and initiative.

Standing upstairs by the drawing table, Dennis looked out the front windows at the falling snow. The wind was coming up, he thought, and that meant the old house would shake again. On nights when the house was shaking, Dennis couldn't sleep, caught up in what he called his architect's X-ray vision. He could imagine the beams inside the walls working against themselves, corners and angles rocking gently back and forth across each other, each little rock and shiver pulling nails a little further out of floor plates and sills, and it didn't matter to Dennis how long the house had been standing there, the only thing he kept coming up with was that one day, or one night, it wouldn't be standing anymore. It doesn't matter how many times you escape disaster by luck, Dennis thought. Every single time, every corner, is a new flip of the coin.

He looked at the Hiding House again, the final drawings almost done, each line perfect, and knew for certain that he was making exactly the right flip of the coin. He'd seen an ad in the
Globe and Mail
for a new firm in Montreal looking for residential designers with a difference, and he had that difference.

Then the pizza guy's car was pulling up outside in the snow, and Dennis was coming down the stairs with a fistful of loonies and quarters. He'd looked in his wallet, already knowing he was out of bills because the head partner at the firm had been in with yet another box of fundraising chocolate-covered almonds. They always taste like wax, Dennis remembered thinking, but he'd bought every single box anyway, forty-five dollars' worth of almonds out stiffening in the trunk of his car, because he'd thought the boss would have to remember an employee who bought up fifteen boxes of charity almonds. It had to be good enough for a reference, Dennis had thought, even if it wasn't good enough to get him out of the grunt-work gulag. Remember me, Mr. Piper? I bought every single box of your daughter's school-trip almonds. All of her Girl Guide cookies. The packages of seeds for garden annuals that never even sprouted, let alone bloomed. Tickets on draws that never ended up having the winners announced, contests never heard of again once you'd written your name and telephone number on tickets from the big roll, as if the contests simply disappeared into thin air without anyone noticing.

He loved to imagine their faces when he told them he had another job—a promotion to partner with a company that really counted—loved to think what it would be like when they opened
Architectural
Digest
and saw the Hiding House all laid out there in front of them with his name on the cover. They'd know that they had missed their chance to be part of something really, really big.