The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [74]
Jean stood quietly, her eyes on the floor.
Without looking at his face, she came back into the room and sat down on a kitchen chair, though she did not take off her coat.
– You're very beautiful, Lucjan said. I'm sorry you're so afraid of me.
He sat at the table. He reached across and slowly pulled her handbag from her lap and with a startling gentleness set it beside her on the table.
In the mornings, Avery was woken by the family that lived upstairs. He heard the children on their tricycles as they rode around and around the dining room table, their father shouting at them to stop, the running up and down, the thump of the front door slamming.
The laundry room was in the basement and Avery knew that, when their mother was sorting the washing, sometimes the children explored his flat. Often they left toys or books behind (once, Tibor Gergely's Animal Orchestra – “the grey seals barked and lifted their fins and tweedled upon their violins …”). Avery did not mind the children's idle browsing among his things; in fact, he was disappointed to come home and not detect their trail. Finding the children's possessions among his own seemed to confer permission, confirmed his place; there, where he did not belong.
Avery lay with the empty house above him. His fellow students were fervent about the design of museums, malls, skyscrapers, mixed-use piazzas, entirely rebuilt urban cores. They were ardent and combative about urban fabric and infrastructure, crowd management and traffic flow. Avery listened to the noise of ambition around him and found himself alone, aching to learn what simple humanism might be possible, against all odds, in an industrial building, Aalto's Sunila or the Olivetti factory at Ivres. He was beginning to realize what it meant to build structures of the humblest and most straightforward disclosure, frank and spare, without irony; capable simply of both sorrow and solace: a house that understands that the entire course of a life can be altered, for better or for worse, by someone walking across a room. A room able to focus all its stillness in a single pear, sliced in half on a plate by a window. A school classroom so beautifully formed and situated that it is an idea. Playgrounds that children could continually redesign themselves, with movable pieces to make forts and shelters. Office buildings with alcoves for reading aloud, and big work spaces (space to think). Why were schools in particular so ugly, so barren, so bereft of aspiration or inspiration, the antithesis of the qualities one would wish to instill in students; cinderblock walls, sickly linoleum, dead light, dreadful basements, institutional fixtures, without self-respect … He knew one could spend just as much money building something lifeless as building something alive … It was not enough to make things less bad; one must make them for the good.
Has evolution moved the bone in our throat to allow for speech, have we learned to stand erect, to measure, to worship, to plant and harvest, to manipulate the atom and explore the gene, to thread needles – philosophic and otherwise – with our prehensile, self-conscious brains, to utter the world in paint and language, because we have no destiny as a species?
These thoughts were attached to the sound of the children running up and down the stairs, to the brief moment of silence when he imagined embraces before they all flew out the door, to the insurmountable fact of the happiness of others, as innocent as a child's name carefully printed in the flyleaf of a book.
For almost a month, Lucjan drew Jean. The velvet dress, the heavy sweater. She did not know if she would take her clothes off for him if he asked, if he moved across the room to her; but he did not. He looked at