The movie star stands at his expansive kitchen window, wondering if he should have taken the architect’s advice and knocked the brick wall open so the entire thing, the whole room, would be exposed to the back gardens of Chelsea. What the hell do you care, the architect had said. Everyone knows your business.
He had come to hate the architect, the way the architect rolled out his plans with a little snap, his starched shirtsleeves neatly cuffed just below his elbows, his nails buffed. The architect would show him the various schemes he had worked through (on my dime, the movie star never added) before rejecting them for whatever the architect had singularly decided upon, what he would then argue for, invoking Corbusier, Kahn, even Wright, as if a Chelsea brownstone could rival Fallingwater, or that beautiful museum in Texas where once, a thousand years ago, the movie star had wandered unseen, unknown. He had been a student then, not a movie star. He had heard the famous professor’s lecture on Kahn’s genius in the famous class and watched as the large man stood on the stage of the lecture hall, the stained-glass windows bathing him in colored light, this a Gothic place, a vaulted place. The famous professor wept when he got to the part about Kahn’s death alone in a bathroom stall in Pennsylvania Station, pants around his knees. The Last Crap lecture, the students called it.
The movie star had wandered in the art museum thinking of the famous professor and his lecture on Kahn, noting the architecture more than the exhibition, the way the light sluiced through narrow windows set somehow behind the angle of the walls, hidden yet emitting the light.
He had told the architect this when first meeting him, the architect a friend of a friend. Everyone always knew someone. The architect had also heard the Last Crap lecture, though a different year, and the two laughed at the famous professor, dead, one of them knew, a few years back. They walked through the brownstone, beginning in the dirt-floor basement and ending on the roof, where, the architect had said, if one had the right imagination (and a whole lot of cash, thought the movie star) one could build another story, maybe two: a hideout, a meditation room, a room of one’s own. The brownstone hadn’t been touched in sixty years. The possibilities were endless given the right vision, the right imagination, the right et cetera and whatnot (and buckets of cash, thought the movie star). They looked out. The sycamores and white pears that lined the street, the red brick of the seminary, its bell tower and bell that still tolled, on the hour, the cathedral and the beautiful gardens, closed most days to the public since 9/11 and now the site of the soon to be Desmond Tutu Inn and Suites; behind, in the back, the small gardens of the Chelsea brownstones and tenements—some just dog runs, others planted, each a tiny terrarium of hope—this one crisscrossed by Tibetan prayer flags, that one with all the wind chimes and birdbaths.
On one of his earlier visits to the house, the movie star felt moved to tell the architect, he had watched as a hawk landed in that giant mulberry a few gardens down. It had perched on the top branch, camouflaged in the green, a rat in its talons it slowly tore to pieces.
Impressive, the architect said, and it might have been then that the movie star had begun to doubt him.I
Most people in the neighborhood recognized him immediately, though the neighborhood had, over the last decade, become the kind of neighborhood where people were used to seeing someone they had already seen ten times their original size on a billboard or the side of a bus or a screen of one sort or another. The people did their part: they did not stare as they ate their red velvet cupcakes, sitting on one of the benches outside the famous cupcake bakery, or their organic ice creams on their way up the steps to walk the High Line, where, inevitably, they waited their turn to look through the telescope out at an installation that meant something they waited in line to read what. If they saw the movie star they walked on, or ground their cigarettes into the sidewalk, or finished the dregs of their coffee looking back at him as he looked at them: blankly.
And who was he, the movie star? A boy whose father took the suitcase down from the hallway closet and buckled its straps, a boy whose father took his hat from the top of the hallway closet and put it on his head. They were in Georgia, or Louisiana, somewhere warm, and outside the daylilies still bloomed and chameleons were black and just beyond, in the bayou, a cottonmouth swallowed a mouse whole. He saw none of it, the boy: he only saw his father leaving as his mother had asked his father to do, only saw the tips of his own filthy sneakers as he sat on the stairs and heard the screen door shut-slam on his father’s way out. His mother said nothing as she sat in the living room waiting for his father to be gone. His father drove to the motel where later the boy would visit and wonder out loud what his father would next do.
“I don’t know,” his father had said. “I have no idea,” the movie star remembers his father saying as he stands unseen in his Chelsea brownstone, his second wife out with the twins somewhere, in the park with the stone seals, he thinks she said. The swings if he was interested in joining them.
I. The reason the movie star found himself in this house at all had to do with divorce and custody, with bad breaks and unbelievable luck, a story the tabloids distorted in the recounting—the movie star’s ex-wife looking forlorn even though she was the one to give him the boot, her modeling career as meteoric, her face as famous as his and maybe even more so. She had tactfully kept to no comment and he had done the same. They were not the kind of couple to sell photographs of their firstborn to magazines.