Kelly told Dexter to drop her off at an airport hotel. She could have demanded that he simply put her on the next plane home, but she didn’t, and it occurred to her that maybe she scared him by doing that. Perhaps he realized just how much trouble she could get him into if she told her story a certain way. He didn’t try to dissuade or persuade her, but took her straight to a big, shining, personality-free hotel in sight of LAX and some long-term parking lots. He booked the room for her, let the desk clerk take his credit card and run it through the machine. He wanted to pay for everything, and Kelly couldn’t see any reason to pay her own way, not now. He owed her a great deal. She saw relief in his face as she took the electronic key. Something was over and now she was obligated, now she was his. It was a significant parting. He said he’d be in touch, but Kelly wasn’t interested. Once you’d stopped believing in a person the way Kelly had stopped believing in Dexter none of it mattered much. It seemed perfectly possible that she’d never hear from him or see him again.
The hotel was a place of spongy carpet, rattan chairs, elevator music that was not only in the elevator, a hotel bar with its Japanese crackers in minuscule bowls, men in lightweight suits who greeted each other too loudly, called each other ‘buddy’ and talked rapidly about deals in Baltimore and Phoenix and Portland.
Her hotel room was anonymously comforting. Its neutrality reassured her; the red laquered headboard and bedside cabinets, a big television on a multi-drawered sideboard. There was a mini-bar and room service, and she did her best to abuse both. She ate and drank in her room. She watched a movie channel. She bought a lot of magazines at the hotel shop. She showered frequently. She was alone in Los Angeles, so what should she do? Take the bus tour, visit Disneyland and Universal Studios? Should she try renting a car and drive around in a panic, feeling lost and threatened with nowhere to go? Should she hire a cab and ask the driver to show her the sights?
On the second day the phone rang. She ignored it. It wouldn’t have mattered who was on the other end since she wasn’t intending to speak to anybody at all. But she knew it had to be Dexter. He alone knew where she was, and he was still the last person she wanted to speak to. There was only one thing to say, only one question worth asking, one answer worth knowing: did he burn down the Cardboard House, and was it by accident or design, out of madness or anger or as another exercise in fixing? But there was no answer she would accept. She could never quite believe him if he said no, and if he said yes then the consequences were too terrible.
He left a message with the switchboard, asking her to call him, if and when she wanted to, in her own time, no hassle, no pressure. Easy to ignore. And then later the same day there was a message from Dexter’s father, of a similarly low intensity, though she thought with a different meaning.
If nothing else the message must mean that somewhere in all this Dexter had explained at least part of the story to his father. Would the account Dexter gave him be any more reliable than the one he’d have given her? Probably not, but as the owner of the house, Bob Dexter must surely have taken some action. Were the police on the case? Insurance investigators? Would they want to talk to her? Might Bob Dexter even make a profit out of the fire? Would he want to drive out and see the wreck for himself?
And what else would Dexter be doing? Hiding? Drinking? Writing his famous article about her, about Christopher Howell’s failure of a daughter? Jesus, he’d certainly have enough material now; but would it be a scholarly footnote or a chunk of lurid gossip, a pathetic true confession? Something told her she would not get to read it. And yet that scenario of Dexter the architectural scholar or journalist didn’t quite convince her. She found it easier to imagine him picking up the pieces of his old life, calling his ex-wife, being persuasive, saying everything would be different, that he was ready to make adjustments, to try again, try harder this time, that he wanted to go back into the family business, to do the right thing, to get serious. The wife would be reluctant at first, but then slowly she’d come round. She’d be so happy, so optimistic. So blonde.
Kelly thought of calling her mother. She too wanted a connection with her old life, her only life, a confirmation that not everything had been burnt to the ground. But naturally she didn’t make the call. It would have been too hard, and she’d have been giving too much away. Her mother would have known something was wrong, and there was no way Kelly could spell out the details of that wrong. Sooner or preferably much later she would have to tell all; it was too big a secret to keep all to herself. But she couldn’t do it now: not from here; not like this.
A silly regret went through her. She should have taken some photographs of the Cardboard House. Would that have preserved anything? Or should she have grabbed something more solid: a door handle, a lump of plaster? Would that have made her feel any better? Was there perhaps still time to get back to the desert, to the charred ruin and grab a piece of blackened window frame, a splinter of smoke-stained glass? Was that what she needed? Or did she just need a drink? Many drinks?
She got sick of her hotel room and her clean body, and she went down to the bar. She sat on a stool, a copy of Vogue set squarely in front of her, trying hard not to notice her surroundings. She had succeeded in not noticing the man sitting beside her, but he heard her accent as she ordered a vodka and tonic and he said, ‘You’re English.’ Then she noticed him: a big man, soft with a fleshy face, big smooth expanses of thick, newly shaved jowls; an ugly man, a dull man, not at all dangerous, not at all attractive.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.
‘You can buy me a drink,’ Kelly replied. ‘But you can’t fuck me.’
He considered the trade-off.
‘That’s what I like about the English, polite, reserved …’
But he bought her a drink, and after he’d given her some flannel about big deals involving designer jeans and Japan and some Industry people down in Culver City, he said, ‘So if you’re not planning to fuck anybody, why exactly are you sitting alone at the bar getting drunk?’
For one insane moment she thought of explaining everything, of letting this dull, inconsequential stranger be her confessor. It had a certain melodramatic appeal but she knew she couldn’t do it, and she knew she couldn’t give him a convincing answer. She got up from her stool and left the bar, took the lift back to her room. When she got there she found a slim, important-looking envelope leaning against the door. Cautiously, dubiously, she took the envelope, held it to her and made sure she was safely inside before opening the seal.
Inside the envelope was a sheet of headed notepaper, Bob Dexter Associates, with a couple of lines of big scrawled handwriting: ‘Kelly, you should probably read this. Call me if you need to talk. Or just call me. Bob.’ The ‘this’ in question was a bound folder of fifteen or so typed pages, an original manuscript, a little creased, a little tinged with age. The document was a letter to Bob Dexter written a long time ago, a letter from an architect to his client. She turned to the first page with more trepidation than hope.
London,
12 November 1969
Dear Bob,
I am back in England, back from the mania and mad aspiration of America, and I think have some apologies to make. I have built you a building and I know it’s a failure. You, unfortunately, know it too. If one or other of us could deceive ourselves, either as blissfully happy, deluded client or as wounded, misunderstood, visionary, deluded architect there might be something to salvage from it all, but I suspect there isn’t.
I know that politicians are told never to apologize and never explain, but as an architect, or at least a would-be architect, and now as a failed architect, I feel a pressing need to do both. Apologizing doesn’t take long. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasted your time, money and materials. I’m sorry that I’m not a better architect, the one that both of us thought and hoped I was. I bit off more than I could chew. My design wasn’t good enough. My handling of men and materials was incompetent. I’m sorry. Yes, apologizing is the easy part. Explaining is something different. What follows may seem like a crazed ramble, but at least I don’t think you’ll be able to dismiss it as self-justification.
You know, there’s an argument that says all human activity is a brave slap in the face of chaos and oblivion. Simply to get out of bed in the morning and not abandon yourself to the forces of dissipation is a kind of triumph. All works of art, I think, are a kind of bridgehead against impending destruction but architecture seems to be a special case.
Most art forms can be abstract or hypothetical, yet a hypothetical building would seem to be an absurdity if not a contradiction in terms. A building that only exists as an abstraction in the architect’s mind is no building at all, whereas a play, a novel, a piece of music can have an existence and a kind of integrity even if it’s never performed, read or heard. There’s always some possibility that poets who never publish or painters who never exhibit will be discovered after their deaths, since even if unacknowledged and unknown their works do actually exist. But an architect who does not build is no architect at all. The plan of a building is not the equivalent of a musical score or a set of stage directions. Architecture is the art of the real and the concrete, in several senses, only some of them ironic.
I’ve heard it said that the first thing the aspiring architect needs to have is rich and indulgent parents. Since I don’t have those, you took on the role instead. Thank you for being indulgent, at least for a while. Sorry if I have made you less rich.
There are not many boy geniuses in the world of architecture, there is no Mozart, and yet Bruce Goff came close. He was born in 1904. By 1916 he was working in an architect’s office. By 1918 he’d had a design published, and by 1919 one of his designs was being built. By the age of twenty-one he’d designed twenty-five buildings, and twelve of these were eventually constructed. You have to be impressed. My favourite Bruce Goff design however is the unbuilt Cowboy Hall of Fame, for Oklahoma City. It consists of six more or less discrete buildings each of them in the shape of a horseshoe. It’s clever, funny, silly and (I suppose you would have to say) kitsch.
Goff, incidentally or not, was a homosexual and was arrested and charged with ‘encouraging a fourteen-year-old boy to become delinquent by … looking upon, touching, mauling and feeling his body’. Goff pleaded guilty. Today there are those who celebrate him as a creator of ‘queer space’.
Frank Lloyd Wright, as a matter of fact, briefly faced charges of white slavery for transporting his Montenegrin mistress across the Wisconsin/Minnesota state line, but the case never came to anything. The mistress’s husband decided Wright wasn’t such a villain after all.
I sometimes like to think that the language of architectural description has a lot in common with the language of sex. There are moments when this seems very significant and moments when it does not. It’s almost invariably a compliment to describe a building as ‘sensuous’. One has often heard ‘virile’ as a term of architectural approbation, ‘effete’ as a term of abuse. ‘Camp’ is even worse.
There are some words that appear, more or less accidentally to be double entendres; words like trusses, buttresses, groins, but perhaps this is only to say that the body and buildings can be described in the same vocabulary.
We all know the expression, almost impossible to use seriously any more, ‘my body is a temple’ and we all know what it means. I’ve never heard anyone say their body was an Anderson shelter or a multi-storey car park or a burger bar, although these are all structures with certain virtues that a body might happily share. On the other hand people are always referring to their bodies as wrecks and ruins.
When we look at the face or body of an ageing but once beautiful woman, what exactly are we seeing? Is it just wrinkles and old skin? Are we simply seeing the effects of time and decay on the fabric of the body? Or are we seeing our own memories of what that face and body once looked like? We look at the fifty-year-old Bette Davis or Tallulah Bankhead and we are reminded of the twenty-year-old version. We view the ruin and we mentally reconstruct the unruined version. And is this perhaps what we do when we view the Colosseum or the Acropolis? We see through the ruin. The ruin helps us to know the early version, the earlier perfection.
I suppose the process is somewhat different for men. True, we may feel a certain nostalgia for the ruined good looks of, say, Orson Welles, but when we look at the older Robert Mitchum or John Wayne we seldom feel much nostalgia for the younger, less craggy versions. Their patina suits them. They seem to have become more themselves, a sort of Mount Rushmore in the flesh. A female equivalent is inconceivable.
Ultimately, however, Mount Rushmore is subject to the same erosive forces as any other man-made thing. I happen to love ruins, but I know that for a ruin to have meaning it must once have been something we would prefer not to see ruined. The piles of stone that once were Nineveh or Babylon are poignant because the places they remind us of were once infinitely so much more than just a pile of stones. A pile of stones that once was Milton Keynes would have far less melancholy splendour.
On the outskirts of Paris there’s an estate known as the Desert de Retz. Built on it is what looks like a broken, fluted column of massive dimensions, sixty-five feet in diameter and perhaps ninety feet high. From its proportions we can see that if the column were complete it would be hundreds of feet tall. The building of which it was a part, a temple, no doubt, would be inhumanly vast, a place where gargantuans worshipped.
But, of course, this column is all too human, and it was never a part of any whole building, and, strangely enough for a column, it has windows. In fact what we’re dealing with here is a folly built in the late eighteenth century by Chevalier Francois Racine de Monville. It was a six-storey dwelling with its rooms laid out in layers round a central spiral staircase.
It’s been used intermittently over the centuries by its various owners, and in an attempt to make it look less like a ruined column and more like a tower, one of them decided to straighten off the roof line so that it lost its jagged, broken appearance. That seems to me to have been an act of moronic incomprehension, trying to unruin a ruin. But time has won a small victory here. Cracks have appeared, chunks of masonry have fallen away from the building, ivy has crawled up and around its walls. It is now uninhabited, possibly uninhabitable. What began as a fake ruin has now become a genuine ruin.
On 27 March 1963, Richard Neutra’s Silverlake Studio, known as the Van der Leeuw Research House, was virtually destroyed by an electrical fire. Photographs show little remaining except a blackened shell. The house had contained almost all of Neutra’s archive: correspondence, plans and drawings, slides and negatives, scrapbooks, his architectural prizes and awards, personal memorabilia; and it all went up in flames. Neutra and his wife Dione were in the mid-West at the time of the fire and they flew back to look at the wreckage. ‘Everything is gone,’ his wife wrote a little later. ‘The past is finished.’ But Neutra looked at the burnt-out shell for all of five seconds, then began discussing ways of rebuilding and improving the house. I guess that’s what a real architect would do. I have to say that over the last few months I’ve wished that the Cardboard House would burn down and release us all.
I’m no Richard Neutra, I’m afraid, but I suspect we already knew that. At this moment I really don’t know who I am at all, who I was trying to be, who my heroes or influences are. I always find it ridiculous when architects say how much they’ve been influenced by Michelangelo and Lutyens and Sir John Soane and Sir John Vanbrugh and Michele Sanmicheli and Donato Bramante and Luis Barragan and Le Corbusier and Alberti and Borromini and Alvar Aalto and Palladio. What could it possibly mean to be ‘influenced’ by those people? Any self-respecting architect who had a sense of that crowd looking over his shoulder while he was trying to create a building shouldn’t be ‘influenced’, he should be absolutely paralysed.
I think of Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s a rather good architect. He’s no Frank Lloyd Wright, but then who is? Fortunately most architects don’t have to live up to quite that sort of direct comparison, but poor Lloyd, being the son, does. Perhaps, however, his greatest achievement, and the thing for which he’ll be best remembered, is inventing the Lincoln Logs toy construction set. I can’t decide if this is a tragedy or not.
I find myself thinking of Jesse Winchester, begetter of the Winchester House in San Jose. She was the daughter-in-law of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, and after her father-in-law and her husband had died, and after having enjoyed the spoils of the Winchester fortune for a great many years, she consulted a psychic in the belief that she needed protecting from the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles.
Perhaps she simply had a building mania, was a sort of Californian Bess of Hardwick, and needed a justification, but whatever the reason, the psychic helped her to believe that she would be safe from the dead while ever the house she was building remained ‘unfinished’. And so Jesse began an open-ended building programme that had incompletion as its chief objective.
There are a hundred and sixty rooms in the Winchester House, thirteen bathrooms, forty staircases – most of them with thirteen steps – though not all of them actually leading anywhere; sometimes they simply ascend to a blank wall. There are Tiffany stained-glass windows in places where the sun never shines. The official guided tour, rather less fun than expected when I went on it, involves a one-mile trail through some but by no means all the house’s rooms.
Ultimately, I don’t know whether Jesse Winchester was a dupe or a paranoiac or just an eccentric, but I know enough about houses and their construction to realize it’s quite easy not to finish them. The world is full of home builders who never quite get round to making those few final, all-important finishing touches. If Jesse Winchester had simply wanted to leave her house ‘unfinished’ surely she need only have left a corner of the bathroom untiled or one ceiling unpainted.
Certainly there were those who might have wished that the Taj Mahal had never been finished. Personally, I’ve always found the Taj Mahal a fairly objectionable building, not least because it’s so self-regardingly pretty, so full of itself. But there are other objections. Shah Jahan built it for his favourite wife, but only as a tomb after she’d died. Wouldn’t it have been more touching if he’d built it for her while she was alive? More objectionable still, once the building was complete Jahan had all the craftsmen who’d worked on it killed because he wanted to make sure they didn’t go off and build something better elsewhere.
The desire to kill builders and workmen, and indeed architects, is an entirely natural one, one that we both understand after our experiences on the Cardboard House, but it still seems a little unnecessary. And it reminds me of the old joke about the English bricklayer who visits the Egyptian Pyramids, and the tour guide tells him they were built by the Pharaohs, and the bricklayer says, ‘I’ll bet the bloody Pharaoh never so much as lifted a brick.’ I mean, if Shah Jahan had really wanted to make sure nothing better was ever built he should have killed himself, because he was the true begetter of the Taj Mahal. Without him there’d have been no building at all.
You know, sometimes I think the whole point of architecture is to create something cold, pure and chaste. But then I think that humanity isn’t cold, pure and chaste, so why on earth should humanity’s buildings be that way?
Humanity is often crass, flawed, damaged, and no doubt we get the buildings we deserve, and although I suspect no architect can deliberately set out to make a crass, flawed, damaged building; undoubtedly many of them can do it by instinct. And when I think of cold, pure, chaste buildings, what I actually find myself thinking of is an igloo, a serviceable structure but not the greatest architectural achievement imaginable. But igloos do have at least one advantage over most buildings, certainly over the crass, flawed and damaged variety; when they’ve served their purpose they melt harmlessly away. Today I certainly wish the Cardboard House would do the same.
Trying to make buildings is a hard, hard job; too hard for me, obviously. I think I’d rather be a William Dowsing, an iconoclast. I’d rather like to go through the world destroying the things I don’t like: the unnecessary decoration, the graven images, the icons, the trademarks. You could turn it into an ideology if you wanted, into a system, but basically I’d do it because it felt good, because it suited my personality. It would be a worthwhile job, a clean job, and I know exactly where I’d start.
I can understand why some people are unhappy at living too closely with the prospect of oblivion, but others seem to find it curiously undisturbing. People build their houses at the base of volcanoes, on flood plains, on fault lines, next to nuclear power stations. It may be a lack of imagination or a silly belief that it can’t happen to them, but I prefer to think they do it because they enjoy thumbing their noses at the inevitability of extinction.
As I said at the beginning, I have made some mistakes, and I’m genuinely sorry. But don’t worry, Bob. It’ll never happen again. I’ll make sure of that.
Sincerely,
Christopher Howell.
She had barely finished reading the letter when the phone rang. This time she answered it, and Bob Dexter was on the other end, his voice sounding close and deep and, yes, fatherly.
‘So now you know,’ he said.
‘What do I know?’
‘If I have to tell you then I guess maybe you don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t you give me the letter when I saw you?’
‘You didn’t need a letter then. You had the house itself.’
‘And now that it’s gone a letter’s supposed to be a substitute?’
‘It’s not supposed to be anything.’
It could have sounded antagonistic coming from someone else, but Bob Dexter was calm, serene, unthreatening. She wanted to cause a ripple in the smooth finish of him, but she doubted she could.
‘How’s Dexter?’ she asked.
‘He’s pretty upset. He feels responsible. He feels guilty.’
‘Yes?’
‘Sure. He thinks he should have done something. If he’d kicked the guy out of the house that afternoon, then the guy wouldn’t have been able to get drunk and set fire to the place.’
So that was the story. How reassuring.
‘And what do you think?’
‘I think guilt’s a very wasteful emotion.’
‘Have you talked to the police?’
‘Well, they’ve talked to me. They found I was the owner of the house. They told me it had burnt down. Pretty decent of them.’
‘Do they want to talk to me?’
He waited just a beat too long before saying, ‘As far as the police are concerned you were never there. You and Dexter were never there.’
‘Very convenient.’
‘Why would you want it to be inconvenient?’
She let it go. What was the point? Who did she need to convince?
‘You all right, Kelly? You need anything? Money? Anything?’
‘No. I’m flying back to England tomorrow. I’ve decided.’
‘That’s good. But you don’t need to. You could stick around if you wanted, do some sightseeing. Go bowling or whatever. If you need a guide then I’d be more than happy.’
‘I won’t be needing a guide.’
‘That’s fine. But if you need me you know where I am.’
‘Why would I need you?’
She needed a drink, another in a long series. Maybe she needed other things too: some good dope, a good man, a good mother, a good father substitute, but they weren’t on offer in the hotel or anywhere else as far as she could tell. Above all she needed not to be alone.
She looked at herself in the mirror, put on a little too much make-up and left her room. She was alone in the lift and its descent seemed endless. So now she knew. Her father had been a failure, a failed architect, and he hadn’t liked that, so he’d wiped the failure from the record and become something else. That didn’t seem so reprehensible. It was all right to fail – perhaps it was inevitable – and after you’d failed you picked yourself up and moved on to the next thing. You told a few lies, blurred a few realities. But what if that failed too? What if you kept free-falling, waiting to hit a bottom that never came?
The lift doors opened and she walked through the lobby into the bar. There were a couple of single men there, but the man with the soft face – her potential confessor – had gone. She ordered a drink and threw back a handful of Japanese crackers. The alcohol would soon be doing its work in her system. She’d be feeling better, more blurred. She’d be feeling less. Then she’d be falling into conversation with some man, hearing him talk about his job, his car, his home town, very pointedly not talking about his wife or children. Yes, he’d be getting lucky tonight. He’d be feeling good about himself. He never realized he had so much charm. And sooner or later they’d be in bed, Kelly staring up at another ceiling, feeling blank and fucked and obliterated, just what she wanted, and then tomorrow she’d fly back to England. She’d become a taxi driver again. She’d still be herself and she’d still have a life. Things would be different but they wouldn’t be over.
And she tried to tell herself that the destruction of the Cardboard House didn’t really matter all that much. A house wasn’t a castle. It wasn’t fortified or impregnable. It was only a place to live, something inanimate. You projected your feelings on to it, but that was all it was; projection, pretence. A house was just inert building materials arranged with greater or lesser degrees of skill, with only the meanings and desires you brought to it.
She knocked back her drink and ordered another. She didn’t feel so bad. She made eye contact with a man on the other side of the bar. For the first time in a long time she felt completely in control. She didn’t feel remotely ruined.