The Exiles (7 page)

PART II

Saturday

CHAPTER
5

The Drive from Chicago

T
HE ONLY THING THAT
lay ahead of George Bedecker was time. Not building plans or competitions or commissions. All that remained was the simple act of endurance, a steady plod until his allotment of days was up. George took comfort in the fact that he could see his own end in sight. He would watch himself suffer in solitude until his body and mind finally gave out. He would not be taken by surprise.

He sat hunched on the edge of the bed, its quilt rough to the touch. Through the motel room’s venetian blinds, the early-morning sun glowed in harsh, parallel strips. George hated venetians. He cringed at the way today’s homeowners rushed to buy houses with sweeping views and then installed blinds that sliced the panoramas to pieces. He designed his own structures with built-in, unobtrusive shade systems. It was the ultimate goal: to build a residence so airtight in its design that future inhabitants would in no way be able to mar it with their own attempts at furnishings, at hardware, at window dressing.

George stood and moved away from the bed. The sun was up
early today. Or, no, that wasn’t possible. George was simply used to rising earlier, well before daylight. It was almost 8:00 a.m. It was time to get on the road. He had one more day and a half of driving to go.

He wasn’t a fast driver. Even as a young man he’d been cautious. Even back then he preferred for someone else to sit behind the wheel, an assistant or a contractor, whoever was in the car. And driving fast wasn’t necessary now. He didn’t have anyone on his tail. Architecture was a field covered not by investigative reporters but solely by critics. An architect, in the press, was observed after the fact and from afar, judged from a distance beyond human scale but still close enough to throw stones.

George had been in the business for more than forty years and had a reputation, of sorts. He’d received international accolades for both the Glasgow Conservatory and his residential works and had fended off his share of hurled rocks, but his status as a master of the field remained in debate. He was no Philip Johnson, certainly, and no Mies van der Rohe, but, to be frank, Johnson hadn’t been Johnson for most of his life. After his peak, Johnson sank and devalued himself. He’d spent these later years building monochromatic skyscrapers and juggling styles the way croupiers shuffle cards. Was this something to aspire to? Maybe. Johnson’s obituaries would surely garner more ink than most architects would earn over the course of an entire career.

Yet even at his peak, Johnson’s daily movements were never tracked by the media. Even the true icon, Frank Lloyd Wright, had only been followed as a person when his life took tragicomic twists worthy of Hollywood: when his homestead burned down with his mistress inside, or when he was arrested for transporting a woman across state lines with lewd intention. Considerably less attention was paid to the movements of merely somewhat-esteemed architects. So the chances were slim that anyone
would notice George Bedecker,
the
George Bedecker, as he drove slowly from Chicago straight past Cleveland and farther east. He had no reason to worry. He shouldn’t be so anxious, yet he felt like a man on the lam.

He’d lied to Philippa, the one person who currently showed concern over his whereabouts, about his intended destination—but his and her relationship had never been entirely forthright. He had almost no clothing with him, only the suit he was wearing and a small leather satchel that held an extra shirt and underwear and toiletries. A full closet was waiting for him at his destination. He hadn’t brought any current work papers, either. His office was still operating but purely in the literal sense. It had been some time since they’d won a prestigious commission. His assistants continued to clock in every day but were increasingly building their own projects on his dime, giving him a token slice of the minimal cash that they earned off these minor constructions.

The motel’s bathroom was cold and clammy, and George balanced himself against the door molding as he brushed his teeth. He checked himself in the mirror, taking a close look at the shallow folds around his eyes. An inch above the thick plastic rims of his glasses, his temple was bare and slick where there had once been hair. He looked remarkably his age, a child of the first half of the last century. He and his buildings, aging into obsolescence in tandem. George was closing in on seventy, the age when most architects finally began to design their most indelible work.

He concentrated on keeping his hand steady, the brush moving mechanically up and down across his teeth, but as the bristles swept past his upper left incisor, the inevitable happened and his arm jerked from the shoulder, the brush cutting up into his gum and then, with another jerk, firmer this time, as if his
elbow was being securely yanked by a marionette string from above, the brush, still gripped tightly in his hand, slipped out of his mouth. Not yet seventy and George Bedecker had designed his last building. He braced himself against the doorway and held his own near-impotent frame as motionless as he could, waiting for the tremor to pass. His doctors had been clear: His nervous system would go first, then his muscle control, and next, if he was lucky, perhaps his brain would slip away, too. George knew exactly what he was in for, but it would take some time, his slow descent, and right now he only needed to make it as far as Rhode Island, where he had a home waiting for him, and where he’d be able to lay his head down and rest.

CHAPTER
6

Wake-up Call

E
MILY LIFTED THE
bedside phone to her ear and listened. The clock’s digital readout flashed 8:00 a.m. Next to her Nate didn’t move. He didn’t even appear to have heard the phone ring.

“Good morning, it’s the front desk, wake-up call—”

“A what?” Emily interrupted the clerk. She sat up, noticed the damask upholstery. Yesterday hadn’t been a dream. “I didn’t ask for a wake-up call,” Emily’s voice croaked in a languid, low register. She hadn’t arranged for a call, had she? Had Nate? They had nothing to wake up for.

“Bedecker, Primrose Suite, eight o’clock a.m. I have it on my list. I’m sure it was arranged,” the woman answered.

What happened to ‘the customer is always right’?

“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding,” the woman said, like one run-on non sequitur to Emily’s ear. And she hung up.

I’m sure it was arranged?
Emily craned her neck and looked at Trevor, asleep, crashed out in the Viking’s excuse for a crib. It was a portable Pack ’n Play, but Trevor slept soundly, confirming
Emily’s long-standing hunch that most of the specialized equipment new parents were conned into buying was unnecessary. A crib, a Pack ’n Play, a Moses basket,
and
a bassinet? For adults, technology was speeding ahead with the release of new, multi-use, all-in-one gadgets each season. For kids, corporations were draining parents of their hard-earned income by doing the opposite—separating out functionality, one device at a time.

“Em? Hon?” Nate said. Emily rolled over and looked at him. His eyes were shut. Seeing was customarily the last of his bodily functions to wake. “You awake?”

“It’s early, go back to sleep,” she said. His breath grew steady again.

Emily gathered the sheet around her as she reached to the floor for her corduroys. She rifled through the pants and found a quarter piece of nicotine gum in one of the back pockets. Tiny, the size of a birth control pill but with more immediate effects, she tucked it into her mouth. She’d barely ever smoked, only socially at parties. She’d always assumed she didn’t have an addictive personality, but somehow the gum had gotten to her. She first tried it on a whim, two years ago, when it was making the rounds at the office. Someone (who? she couldn’t remember) had brought a pack to a late-night brainstorming session. Emily wasn’t addicted, she didn’t
need
it. She’d given the gum up entirely when she was pregnant. It simply made her feel good, and there were worse vices. She slid into her pants, tossed her underwear aside—they had only the clothes that they’d worn yesterday and would have to do a hand-wash soon—and pulled her tank top over her head.

In the living room she went through the desk’s narrow drawer and removed all of the city guides and stacked them on the desktop. The booklets made Newport look like a theme park, with its sugarcoated downtown lanes. The street where Nate and
Emily now owned a house wasn’t on one of these picturesque thoroughfares. From what she remembered, it was on a slim cul-de-sac that was barely large enough for two cars to pass each other. Their house itself was purposefully middle-of-the-road. It was made to be lived in, with a small porch, an attic, and a basement. Nate’s eyes had lit up over these mundane details, as if the entire house was an aluminum-roofed fuck-you to his father. Emily had seen the covetous look in Nate’s eyes when they first walked up to the house, their babbling chipmunk of a real-estate agent leading the way, pointing out the slate walkway, the storm windows, the security system.
We’ll take it!

Emily hated feeling complicit in Nate’s cold war against his dad, but she knew it was the right house for them. She’d joked to Jeanne about this, about its lack of pretension, about its authenticity. The house was “real,” she’d told Jeanne. It was the kind of place where a family would live.

On most days, when Emily imagined their new existence inside this new house, she saw a contained and routine life, the kind of life they’d have if their old selves were put inside a dryer on high and came out a few sizes smaller. On other days, she let herself fantasize about the wildly exuberant life they might live here, an unlikely fantasy existence, liberal and hippy and unabashedly intellectual (with free-flowing cash and a formal dining room and vegetables growing in the yard) and without Manhattan’s constraints. This glossy future was boldly unreal, but when she tried to conjure an in-between, she came up empty. Some days, recently, she worried that they might not have a future at all.

The day they’d found the house, they’d walked through the structure from room to room, opening all of the closets and cabinets, and Emily asked Nate what he thought their life would be like here. “Who knows?” he responded.

“But really?” she’d said.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged.

Nate had never been one to imagine the years to come. At night, in New York, after they’d moved in together but before Trevor was conceived, Emily spoke to him of their future. This was when she’d still imagined both of their careers soaring if they persevered long enough, though it turned out that perseverance had little to do with it. They’d talked about traveling, two weeks of hiking remote Patagonian trails in Argentina or Chile once their debts were paid off, and buying an actual Manhattan apartment, throwing their own parties. What Nate couldn’t imagine, he said, was having kids. It was the sticking point. He could imagine marriage, he claimed to want that, but he always insisted that he couldn’t picture raising children. Emily had hoped it was just a phase he was going through, and she was relieved when, after he found out she was pregnant and planning to have (and keep) their child, he stuck around. Now his love for their son was fierce. You’d think the boy was set to die in a week the way Nate maintained a watchful eye on him, his gaze following Trevor as if the child had a homing beacon lodged in his gut. The marriage question came up again after Trevor’s birth (they’d unintentionally solved their stickiest issue, the baby thing), but by then, Emily was laughing it off. They’d missed the boat on marriage, hadn’t they? She didn’t want to wed just because they had a child. She wanted to wed because Nate was her soul mate. Most days she still thought he was. She looked at him and saw the Nate she’d met that first day in the cab from JFK: a man who seemed genuinely unable to take his eyes off her. But on other days, recently, he’d seemed aloof, unreachable. She still loved him, but she was no longer sure she understood him.

The future remained a moot topic for him even after Trevor’s
birth. It was Emily who had to insist that they draw up wills—not for financial reasons, they didn’t have anything except debt to leave behind, but to name a guardian for the boy in case he found himself parentless. They’d chosen Emily’s brother, Bobby, and his wife, Dahlia, even though Bobby and Emily hadn’t spoken much in recent years. He was eight years older and ever since he left for college, when Emily was still a child, he’d returned only once or twice a year to the East Coast. But he was a blood relation and lived in San Francisco, where his own children ate primarily organic food and volunteered at an animal shelter on the weekends, and it was the kind of childhood anyone, Emily thought, would want. Bobby was the one person Emily had considered calling yesterday and burdening with their sudden carless straits. He wouldn’t scorn Nate and her for their inability to hold on to their vehicle and its contents—he had a West Coaster’s predisposition toward irrational generosity of spirit. She could almost imagine telling him about her other problems, too. But this version of Bobby, the sympathetic older brother who’d help her get out of a jam, he was a fantasy, as well. Her actual brother was a kind but distant figure to whom she’d never truly opened up and whose generous spirit came tinged with a self-righteous edge.

“I think I’ve got jet lag,” Nate said now. “I can’t sleep.”

Emily looked up and saw him in the bedroom doorway, wearing one of the hotel’s robes.

“I know. The little one outlasted both of us,” Emily said. Trevor usually awoke soon after eight, but hadn’t yet stirred and it was—Emily glanced at her watch again—almost eight thirty. He’d spent two hours fussing in the middle of the night, crying on and off, keeping Emily busy while Nate, oblivious or exhausted, slept. Emily would have been awake all night anyway. The stress of the day, the idiocy of her week, the loss of the
car—on Emily, it had the cumulative effect of a strong liquid stimulant.

“No word on the Jeep?” Nate asked