Page 58 of On His Mind

Inside, the corridor runs a hundred feet with nothing in it but floorboards and light. I walk him to the middle and stop, and he stops.

“Look up.”

The ceiling steps in three planes, and above the third, the windows sit high in the wall, throwing light down the plaster so it comes at you sideways and soft, from above. Even now. Even at one in the afternoon in the first week of March.

He looks up for a long time.

“There’s no lights on,” he says.

“They’ve been broken for years.” I take him a little way down, to where the ceiling changes. “See how it lifts here. They didn’t have to do that. It’s a hallway. You walk through a hallway. It doesn’t need light like this.”

“So why’d they?”

“Because somebody in 1897 thought a hallway was worth doing well.” I put my hand flat against the plaster. “That’s a clerestory. Those windows up there. The whole point of one is you get light without anyone seeing in, and it comes from above, so it never glares. It just falls.”

“Clerestory,” he repeats.

He says it again under his breath. Then he walks. He goes twenty feet down the corridor and turns around slowly. His head comes up. He looks at the door we came in by. Then down the whole length of the hall to the far door. Then back up at the windows.

“It’s the doors,” he says.

I look at them.

“You can see both of them.” He’s still turning. “From anywhere in here. There’s nowhere in this hall you can’t see both ways out.”

He’s right. He is completely, precisely right, and I have never once seen it. Not in two years. Because every minute I’ve spent in this corridor, I spent looking at the light.

“Is that why it feels like this?” he asks.

“Maybe.” My voice does something. I clear my throat. “Probably. Yes.”

He nods and goes back to looking at the ceiling. I stand in the middle of my favorite building and notice that he finds the exits before he finds the windows, and every instinct I have is to ask why, but I don’t. He’d answer me. That’s what stops me. He’d answer me if I asked. I show him the transom over the far door instead.

We’re in there for ninety minutes. It’s thirty degrees, and my hands ache, but I talk more than I mean to. I tell him why the floorboards run the way they run. I tell him about load and span, and why the wing is only one room deep, and how you can date a window from across a street if you know what proportion to look for. He asks maybe four questions total, and not one of them is a question anybody has ever asked me. Not whether it’s valuable. Not whether it’s famous. He asks whether the men who built it knew it would still be standing. He asks whether they signed it anywhere. And somewhere in the middle of the hour, I catch myself gesturing with both hands, and my voice pitched high. I’m showing off. I’ve never shown off in my life. I was raised in a house where wanting to be seen was the vulgarest thing a person could do, and I am standing in a freezing corridor performing a building for an audience of one.

I take my hands down.

Then he says, “I have to get going, Penelope.”

Hearing my name from his voice shocks me back to reality. There’s a big piece of me that wants to see him play. Something moves in me that wants to ask if I can come. I don’t ask. I shove it down and smile.

“Have a good game, Percy.”

Then he’s off, and I stay there for about twenty minutes, looking up to watch the light.

That afternoon, I’m at Whitmore and they have me working on Chicago. That’s what everyone calls it now. Chicago. As though the city and the project are one object, which for me they will be. Ashfield’s behind me, and now there’s a real ground-up, twenty-two thousand square feet on a corner in a city I don’t want to live in, and my sheets go into the set with my initials in the block. And here’s the joke of it, which nobody would find funny but me. The work is extraordinary. I love it. I sit down at one, and I look up, and it’s five, and I haven’t moved, and my hand aches, and something that was broken at ten this morning is solved. Oliver hands me things above my grade and I do them and hand them back better, and every single day I walk into that building and do the one thing on earth I love.

I can’t even hate it properly. That’s the cruelty.

Four separate times this week, I think I’ll finally say it. I don’t want Chicago. It gets as far as my teeth on Wednesday, when Oliver leans over my desk to look at the east elevation and says, “That’s good. That’s going in the set.” He isn’t standing too close. He’s exactly the right distance away.

“Thank you,” I say.

My New Year’s Resolution list is still folded in the back of my sketchbook. I don’t need to be reminded of what it says. I know what it says.

My mother calls on Sunday morning.

“Penelope. Honey.”