14

GQ had once listed me as one of the “Ten Men Who Look Best in a Tux.” It was not the sort of honor I sought. It was my opinion that Tutankhamen’s mummy would look pretty good in a tuxedo.

Even when the audience that filled Davies Hall was hushed there was that wash of sounds that makes the presence of a thousand people known. But then, as the envelope turned in the fingers of the master of ceremonies, and the thick, soft paper began to tear, the audience took in its breath.

The auditorium was silent. It was that quiet I love, tension about to be broken. The spotlight reflected hard off the microphone clipped to the master of ceremonies’ black lapel. The envelope tore, and the off-white card was half lifted from its paper housing, and then caught. The envelope fought back somehow, clinging to the card within it, one corner snagging, as though the name of the recipient shrank from human touch.

The master of ceremonies blinked to adjust his contact lenses, perhaps, and with the timing of so many such stagestruck speakers he took one second too long to acknowledge that he knew something the entire assembly did not.

The master of ceremonies was the president of a major corporation, an impeccably attired patron of the arts, and he was a man accustomed to working in private, in the boardroom, in the oak-and-leather box of an office. He enjoyed this attention, and he wanted to keep it, feeling in the beam of the stagelight a power that he, for all his accomplishments, relished.

The emcee spoke, and to me the syllables were for an instant entirely unfamiliar.

Not me, I thought, in a confused attempt to protect myself from disappointment. Surely it’s somebody else.

Nona was squeezing my hand, gripping it hard, with a clench like terror, except that she was smiling, her beauty smiling into my eyes. People were turning to clap their hands at me.

What an incantation a name is, meaningless sounds that are, at the same time, as intimate as a gland, or a first memory. I was dazed. I made myself repeat the syllables he had spoken, to make sure that I had heard correctly.

My name.

Christ, they’ll think I’m milking the applause. More faces were turning to look, still smiling but touched, now, with curiosity. Eyes were on mine.

I pulled myself to my feet, the applause swept me onto the stage. Fortunately the stage had that reassuring artificial look, the look of a place that was hyperreal, lurid and awash with light and at the same time fake. The floorboards gleamed. The podium was far in the distance, a monolith I could never reach.

The audience was comprised of professional designers and architects, and the critics who approved and derided them. Then, naturally, there were the hundreds of people who employed these professionals.

I reached the podium and accepted the award, a simple, purist-pleasing rectangle of engraved paper. I turned, and for a moment it happened.

Peterson would be standing here, I told myself. Blake Howard would be sitting there, at the end of an aisle, his usual sort of seat, smiling toward the stage.

How strange the theater looked from where I stood. I surveyed the blur of faces, and what I saw resolved itself into individual countenances. These were the well-fed, wrinkles surgically erased, hair transplanted, jawlines lifted, women long past childbearing kept eerily teenage-thin.

These were the men and women I knew well, some of them friends since my childhood. Isn’t it wonderful of Stratton to take up architecture, family friends had smiled, but at the same time it had been obvious that they generally thought it just a bit odd that I shouldn’t content myself with horses and a tasteful and slightly dull collection of eighteenth-century oils.

There was DeVere, his eyes hard.

I began to speak, and the years of training, practicing careful diction under the attention of a gifted man who was at once teacher and servant, and the years of watching my parents at ease in public, all stood with me.

I praised Peterson’s work. I offered the solemn memory of the promising architect, and of “San Francisco’s best friend,” Blake Howard. By instinct, I was able to choose exactly the words people wanted to hear. Looking upward, up the slope of the seats, through the haze of faces and the glints off jewels here and there in the audience, I sought Nona’s face, and found it, continuing to offer my thanks, my appreciation to my fellow designers and architects, sustained by the sight of her encouraging smile.

It was then that I saw a new person, a stranger, slip into the room.

She stepped through the doors at the end of the aisle, declined with the easy wave of a hand the assistance of an usher, and slipped into a seat at the end of the very top row. It was a glimpse, only, of a figure with white hair, a latecomer, wearing something moon-bright and resplendent, a gown.

My voice was steady. But as I spoke there were thoughts edging in on me, pressing upon my pleasure. Now, I thought, they’ll start to actually build one of my projects. Now they’ll take me seriously and let my gardens take their place in the real world, and not only in a few out-of-the-way corners. I would get commissions from around the world.

I should have felt joy. I should have felt the bliss of honor. What I felt was anger. They had withheld this sort of public acceptance from me for a long time. Too long. I had redesigned a cardiologist’s mock-Tudor, managing to make the residence into an office building without making it look cheapened. I had doctored a multistory parking complex so that it now looked more like a set of hanging gardens, gracing San Francisco instead of punishing it. But most of my dream gardens, dream landscapes, dream glimpses of what structures could be if we gave ourselves over to trees and ivy, natural wood and native stone, remained in the realm of the unlikely, sets for plays no one would ever produce.

I had designed birdbaths, wading pools. Now, I thought, I can actually accomplish something real, and not be rewarded as a visionary, a man of dreams that are too beautiful to be made concrete. “You think too much,” my brother had once said. “Beauty’s a luxury. All that prettiness is so much perfume—nice, but not worth the earthquake insurance.”

Now all that futility was behind me.

The reception was what the society columnists would call a “sparkling affair.” I shook hands and accepted warm congratulations. It was obvious that Peterson’s lurid death was eagerly put out of mind for the moment, and Blake’s loss was not enough to dim the event. The celebration was all that I could have wished.

Barry Montague, my doctor, clapped me on the back and said that this was the best thing that had happened for a long time. We promised each other again that soon we would play tennis, “like the old days,” said Barry. “Although I think you’ll clobber me.” He patted his stomach. “Too many doughnuts.”

Fern fingered the stem of an empty glass, beside the rush of palms into which he had just emptied his bubbly. He looked much better in a tux than most big men, and I had to remind myself that Fern was experienced with protecting the lives of ambassadors, a man who was accustomed to wearing a gun under any sort of clothing.

To my surprise, my brother was there. He made his usual pistol-shot with his fingers, the way he usually said hello, what he called “the silent hi.” I nearly always had the same, simultaneous linked thoughts when I saw Rick.

I thought how good it was to see him, and at the same time: I wonder what sort of trouble he’s in now. There is something electric between the two of us, something that springs from our shared memories. The woman with him was a dream-vision of high couture and something vaguely dissolute, a fashion model turned courtesan.

I made my way through the crowd, unable to attract the attention of Nona. She was chatting with women in brightly colored dresses while dressed herself in something subdued, dark blue, clothes that made her look like a woman who had taste and, at the same time, someone who could save your life.

“Of course you won,” said Rick with a smile. “You’re a winner—like me.”

Rick was a little thinner than usual, still looking like a man who could get a job as a model himself, Suits for the Man on the Go. He introduced me to “Honey—that’s her name—right out of a storybook,” the sort of meaninglessly pleasing statement Rick had made a specialty. I studied his face, his eyes, for signs of drinking, drugs, even recent accidents. He had crashed a string of sportscars, including that near-fatal crash at Devil’s Slide not so long before. Physically, we looked very much like brothers.

Rick put his arm around me, my younger brother acting like the protective sibling. “I’m proud of you, Strater.”

His compliment warmed me inside. I thanked him.

“I knew you were a winner, all the way, even when we were kids.”

It was the kind of boyish nonsense Rick manufactured nonstop, but this once it worked with me, and I was pleased.

“That news about Blake was really bad. Really hit me hard,” he said. He was being truthful, I knew, but he had probably been skiing in the Alps when the news had reached him, and he was too lively and unsentimental to bother with memorial services. “You ought to drive up and see Mother,” he said. “Tell her about the award. She’d like that.”

I wasn’t in the mood to talk about Mother. “She was never enthusiastic about me drawing pictures.”

“I’m not exactly something for her to show off to the nurses. I saw her a few months ago.”

“How was she?”

I rarely saw Rick looking so thoughtful, or troubled. All he said about her was, after a long moment, “Quiet. Not peaceful, exactly. Just quiet.”

The doctors had asked us to stop visiting her. After our visits, the word had been, she was “uncontrollable for days, except under chemical maintenance.” I knew what that meant—the sort of sedative that sent a patient into a virtual coma.

“But go on and have your party, for Christ’s sake,” Rick laughed. “We’ll talk about Mom some other time.”

I left my brother to Honey and made my way through well-wishers, feeling buoyant despite the talk of my mother and the strain in my brother’s voice.

DeVere caught my eye. I stepped up to him, wishing he would vanish from my sight.

“Enjoy the prize,” he said.