Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh
saw the little creek foreshortened as it came at you, its streambed lined with rocks. The water was then pumped back up again out of the pond, which—he wished he could tell his mother this and have her understand him—said something about what might be known about eternity.
In this pond Carlo’s girlfriend, who then became his wife, had planted water lilies. Julie Empy was a landscape architect who had trained with Garrett Eckbo. The entry was an empty box. It held nothing but light and air and the sound of the flowing water. It was in this pond that Alec kept his three meaty carp, large fish that were each astonishingly individual and petlike. The arc of their flashing colors, a yellow gold and a reddish gold and a white that was opalescent, often made Alec feel he was present at a moment of creation.
His mother frowned at the whiskered ones, waved her tiny hand before her face as if to wipe the wet away. She was terrified of rats, fish, all of wild nature, of snakes and bugs and of the savage giantness of a redwood tree. This was the reason Alec and his sister were never allowed a dog when they were growing up, nor a cat, nor even a parakeet. Water running within a house? Viv asked, the baby might totter in and drown.
Alec’s house was as pure as koi, he consoled himself. His real father might have admired it had he lived past 1974. His true spiritual father—Alec often almost actually believed this—was the visionary Louis Kahn, the most important American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, as he tried to instruct his parents. They nodded, their faces poised and blank to show they weren’t actually listening. Why was he not Alec Ben Kahn or Alec Son of Rothko (who was born killed) or of Charles Moore, with whom Alec had briefly worked when each of them was at Cal?
His parents liked Alec’s house, they said—it just wasn’t particularly homey.
“Homey?” Alec choked. This was years later, years even after his father died, but Alec found he was still stung by his father’s saying this. He was on the phone to Betsy. They were laughing at their parents. Laughing at their parents was the way the two of them had always kept themselves from going straight to Queens to kill them.
“What can I tell you, Alec?” Betsy asked. “It’s ten, eleven years and she’s still fussing about the wall-to-wall. She thinks you don’t have drapes because you ran out of money.” Betsy and her husband lived out in Riverhead. Betsy and Ben had the wall-to-wall. “She worries people across the way could look in and see her use the toilet.”
“Homey?” Alec said again. Tears of sick mirth stood in his eyes. Alec objected to just exactly that blend of schmaltz and wishfulness. The experience of home or homeland might come to those who were particularly blessed. Jews, however, had such a talent for exile that the memory of loss seemed to him to be embedded within their bones. Everyone in Berkeley, aside from Gina, had moved here from somewhere else, many from far-off countries.
Alec hated the way a word like “home” or “family” was warped the way a logo was by computer graphics, twisted, whizzed away by clients who were veering off into the purest state of self-delusion. Clients came to him insisting on a study in which they would never read a book or even manage a moment to quietly sit. Everyone these days was too busy being gone, out making money or writing the screenplay for the movie of the story of their own lives.
Alec was a big man, nearly six feet three. He often scaled rooms outward from the sense of his own anatomy—he made rooms big enough to accommodate his stride and physical restlessness. This was to relieve him of the Queensish feeling of having the ceiling come down on him. He and Gina furnished the rooms of their house slowly, sparingly, with a few good things that having little kids wouldn’t immediately wreck. Alec needed the sense of open spaces, needed to continue to witness the terrain and vistas, access, egress. These were what Moore called the spiritual matters of architecture, those concerning path and axis. How people might come and go within a room, how they might actually sit and breathe and read and be alive in one.
Try as they did, his parents were too old to ever learn the map of his house and so seemed to wander in that place as if they’d been lost for days.
Alec had always been a good student, never got in much trouble. He was a citizen, a mensch, had always been their good and loving son who was dutiful and never fucked around much but had kept his head down and had worked hard and had achieved much of what he’d set out for himself—his work and getting to see something of the world. He married, had two children, including the son that would carry on his father’s, okay goyish, name. He was hardworking, a good provider, had stayed married when it might have been easy enough for him to have found the reasons not to, but all this just wasn’t homey enough for Stu and Viv? It occurred to him he may have stayed with Gina in order to somehow spite them.
The two always subtly blamed Gina for whatever lack of the domestic touch they missed, usually something as cornball as tea towels embroidered with the Hebrew letters “chai,” or that there were the wrong birds on this side of the Rockies. This was because Gina was an orphan and wasn’t Jewish.
Or there may have been some tiny precipitating event, something about how Gina had once worn a sheer nightie down the hall on 219th to use the toilet without pulling a bathrobe on—his parents were both dumbstruck by her immodesty. “Oh hi, folks,” she said sleepily as she passed the open door to their bedroom. She was full-bellied, hugely pregnant, exhibited no shame in it.
“What can I tell you?” Viv told Alec’s sister. “She’s from California .” Betsy, who may have been ambivalent before, became, at that moment, Gina’s most staunch defender.
The house was acclaimed both for the purity of its design and for the theoretical efficiency of its energy use. It was heated by a system of water pipes running beneath the hardwood floors. The designer of this particular heating system was Frank Lloyd Wright, but Alec’s parents had already dismissed him from any importance since, unlike Kahn, he lacked the requisite Jewishness.
The house was cold because its systems worked imperfectly—Alec went back to the drawing board, above which he had pushpinned this, his own carefully written-out motto which was DON’T SELL THE BIKE SHOP, ORVILLE. He worked patiently. Alec was nothing if not patient, if patient in a few matters only . This was one: the time and money and psychological distance it took to build a real house, a real house being one that actually deserved to exist and take up space in an already too-crowded world. A real house was one that had achieved its own perfection. Often it was very simple. Alec didn’t actually believe in perfection but thought of it as he did the Unified Field Theory—he’d bet a lot of money the Unified Field was never going to happen.
Alec saw the house broken back down again into its elements: the softest graphite riding the smoothest sheet of vellum. As long as Alec lived and drew breath, there was still the possibility of actually achieving an exquisite balance of planes and shapes and formulae, and this lay in the same place off where the quantum met the Theory of Relativity, Hawking and Einstein touched, meshed. Everyone would know the moment though no one would at first believe it, just as Newton didn’t actually believe anyone sound of mind could believe in the Laws of Gravity. The truth in math could, however, be proved and proved and proved. Jerry Bloom said they’d most likely find the Theory of Everything by looking in an unlikely place. How Alec loved all math, particularly geometry and trigonometry, how he hoped to believe these manmade languages spoke of rules that accurately described the structure of the universe, as gravity did, in that it could be proved and proved and proved. It was this he loved, the theoretical rush of a torrent of light just as it struck the three-dimensional.
He imagined the house just as he had once dreamed it: a simple set of luminous volumes floating behind the oaks as seen from the road downhill. The house showed only on the private side, turning its back to the public street in a manner that was both Mexican and Japanese. Descartes looped up around the hill behind his house, dead-ending at the Blooms’ and the Chakravartys’, whose houses sat on the cul-de-sac.
He saw the house to be as elemental as the perfect chair he had not yet designed but might one day, the old joke being that the most brilliant of architects was incapable of making a chair that not only looked good in a room but was actually comfortable for a human being to sit in. A chair had every physical and aesthetic