Skyscraper

Chapter 2

Chapter 2I’ve never thought of myself as a masochist. Before Tad, I simply considered myself used up. My metamorphosis began the night I met him, or rather, earlier that evening, at Peaches, a gentleman’s steakhouse and strip club on the Upper East Side.

Darrin, a Princeton friend and owner of Colliers, the successful boutique architectural firm where I worked, liked rare meat and big t**s. I was early for our dinner, so I stopped at a dive bar. I needed a scotch. My gut told me Darrin would fire me before dessert. Despite some early success as an architect, my work had becoming increasingly uninspired and at times downright sloppy. He kept me on out of friendship, and pity. After two scotches, I was ready to face him.

Peaches was down a narrow alley-like jag of 59th Street between First and Second Avenue, running along the Queensborough Bridge. It was late October and unseasonably oppressive. I was sweating, and had stopped to steady myself when a misty rain slid in from nowhere. Straight ahead, over the East River, the dusky night sky was blue and serene, but directly above, dark clouds crawled from the West. I took cover under a shop awning then looked toward the bridge. The mammoth structure swooped up in a series of half-circle arcs that peaked skyward in elaborate pinnacles of iron work. Those peaks were regal crowns, and the massive arch of stones holding the bridge at several base spots was a king’s monument. I suppose that was the first glimmer of change in me, but at the time I shrugged it off as booze-induced.

I was a touch late, and Darrin was already at his regular booth at the far side of the club. The place was a mix of black and blue, a series of dark licorice-colored leather chairs, tables, and booth clusters against black marble floors. There was a raised circular level just above the seating area, lined with a long curling brass hand rail for the girls to slither along. In corners, black velvet curtains hid small cloistered VIP booths for private shows. It was a large place, lit with several lavender signs spelling out Champagne Bar and Show Girls in white letters, along with garish chandeliers that burst like glowing electric beehives in the four corners. A long bar snaked around the entire outer rim, and against one wall was the stage. Manhattan evaporated once you sat, sipped your first cocktail, and slid a twenty dollar bill into the cleavage of a buxom young girl. While I did not sleep with women, I found the dancers’ sculpted perfection enthralling.

“I got you a Scotch,” Darrin said, not meeting my eyes.

I imagined this would be awkward for him. The past few years I’d done the bare minimum at Colliers. Most days, I skulked around, never leading a project, contributing drab and sometimes sour ideas. I was a fallen thing, that over-ripened fruit left in the bowl. Forgotten until the flies devoured it and someone absentmindedly tossed the mess out, pewter bowl and all. Men ten years my junior regarded me as an odd fixture, a long-time firm member who was pushing forty, a friend of the owner, the guy who had designed something of minor note a long time ago (an office building in Atlanta, not a Manhattan glamor project.) What happened to dry me up, to leave me increasingly agitated and useless, baffled me. I imagined there was a slow but ravenous worm that had crept under my skin, patiently devouring my desire to lead any sort of satisfied life. While I had an inherited fortune, and in truth did not need to work, I feared that letting go of the last thread of balance in my strangely dissolving existence would lead to utter ruin. Darrin had been valiantly patient. I knew I was an embarrassment.

There was a hush as the blue lights dimmed and a white haze hit the stage. Her name was Candace and she was a bright blonde. Darrin had f****d her. She looked like a eugenics solution, every angle and curve perfect, hair shellacked, eyes bold, and lips trembling even at a distance. For a brief moment, I thought of the bridge, those regal swoops as Candace gripped a pole and threw two long lean legs over her head.

“We have the Wolfe contract. Mexico City,” Darrin said. “Can you f*****g believe that? We’re moving forward with this one. It’s happening. He says he wants it to be the Shard of Mexico. He’s giving us free reign to come up with a design.”

My glass was perched at the curve of my lip, and as I glanced down into the rusty liquor, I could see the half-moon arc of amber booze sloshing side to side, and a tiny nick in the rim of the glass. This was not the conversation I expected to have.

The Wolfe contract seemed out of reach for Colliers. The skyscraper was being built in the burgeoning Paseo de la Reforma district of Mexico City. Comparing it to the Shard, revered architect Renzo Piano’s thousand foot stunner on the South Bank of London seemed, in a word, ridiculous. Darrin downed his martini. The young serving girl with perfect t**s was back. We ordered steaks.

“I’m throwing it open, the position of lead designer. It’s going to get a lot of attention. Wolfe is a big personality. I want you to come up with something.”

I drank.

“How did you manage it? I wouldn’t have thought we could handle a job like that,” I said.

He gave me a long, sad look. I realized I’d insulted him.

“I spent some time down in Mexico. Wolfe became a friend. It’s what we do,” Darrin said, then more softly, “Is there anything left in you, Atticus?”

What I wanted to say was: a bit of sawdust, ideally more liquor by night’s end. Instead I simply shrugged.

Darrin and I had been roommates at Princeton. We’d dreamed of creating things together, things that he had done and I had abandoned. We’d bonded over an ancient bottle of oak reserve scotch one December night in our freshman year. It was near Christmas and the campus, already deserted and ghostly, was slammed with an arctic blizzard that sheathed our windows with a skin of ice and the streets with spiraling drifts of snow. Through the frost-blurred glass we envisioned the snow peaks as towers we would build. Darrin opened our dorm room window to the storm, proclaiming that each heavy icicle offered a perfect design. As they melt, he said, they revealed the ever-changing possibility of form. Warm with scotch, we shunned the reality of midnight frostbite, and dashed across the grand lawn, plucking icy stalagmites from frost burdened trees.

We separated briefly during our hunt, lost momentarily in a blackness that was made startlingly bright with the thrashing wall of snow. Pausing to get my bearings, I saw a bird frozen at the top of a six foot drift, one wing buried, the other rising out of the snow mid-flight. We stumbled back, shivering and blue to our rooms, but the vision of the bird as an ornamental peak stayed with me. We passed out watching our captured icicles, waking to a sunlit room and several dark wet patches on the carpet where the imagined sculptures had been.

Over the years, Darrin had put up with my slow disintegration. The honorable thing was to quit, since he was too kind to fire me. I felt as if the air had left not only the room, but my lungs and body. The tiny worm inside of me took a few more bites and I wondered what I would do. Retire at thirty-nine? Travel? Become a morbid recluse? Hire randy escorts? Become addicted to pain killers? The possibilities were endless.

Candace was down to a G-string. Her mouth was open wide as if she were going to devour something in a gulp. It all peaked with a rush of music and a few flashes of light, then she was in a chair next to Darrin. He gave her a kiss, then turned to me. His eyes were no longer sad.

“This girl is perfect. If only we could freeze her, all of them. It’s really amazing this level of perfection. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

He turned and touched Candace’s breasts and she nuzzled him. He would take her home to his place. He tipped everyone heavily at the club and paid Candace and the girls well for their time. Candace smiled at me, and I was struck by her refined elegance. She sat perfectly straight, shoulders thrust back, hands folded on the table, her neck gazelle-like, a natural continuation of the gentle flow that was her body. Her hair, slick and highly set, offered a dazzling pinnacle. Again I thought of the bridge, and there was a jolt of energy in my increasingly liquor-soaked brain as Candace stretched an arm across the table to touch Darrin and I saw in that line a structured and glimmering beam. I shut my eyes, dizzy and tired.

I left them and went to get drunk at the dankest leather bar I could find. That was when I met Tad.