Perfecting the systems took Alec and Carlo almost eighteen months. Carlo was a saint; he had also trained at M.I.T. in structural engineering. The floorboards came up; the pipes were then relaid. He and Gina and the kids camped out on the lower level during the mess of reconstruction—this space would later replace the place on McGee Avenue that she was using as her studio. McGee was Gina’s house when she was growing up.
Finally, the concrete was poured again, the floorboards reset. It was a wonderful house, was acclaimed as such. People wanted one—this surprised him since Alec had such a generalized contempt for so much of the taste of his fellow man. He and Carlo went on to build similar houses in the hills of Oakland and Orinda. There was one in Marin County, another larger one faced north in Encino, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, this one done for a movie star. The glow at night could be seen for miles.
The Baxter House had been perfected, but that ruined first visit was the last trip his father ever made to Berkeley, a place so Bad for the Jews that Stuart would evermore refuse to come.
9
Irrational Numbers
ALEC CLIMBED THE slow slope of his hill, thinking of the beauty of the most simple physics, of how he might have built his house before the Industrial Revolution, before the Age of the Machine, how the pharaohs had built the pyramids using only levers and the inclined plane and the sweating deaths of a million slaves.
He was walking home from the bus stop down on Shattuck Avenue as he did every evening—he walked in order to keep his heart and lungs in good working order. He also liked the speed of walking, that it took his mind home at the same slow pace as his moving limbs so all of him arrived more or less together. The wisdom of slow locomotion, Alec knew, was what the Amish practiced. Stuart’s mother, Grandma Leah, born in Minsk, once traveled to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and there mistook the Amish for Orthodox Jews and so spoke to them in Yiddish.
Alec was fit but not lean, as Gina recently told him. She went to the gym to work out to get the job more quickly done. His wife simply had no time, as she had started to exclaim. His wife, these days, had infinite things to do on her path to some kind of high art righteousness.
Alec had a Fiat Sport in the carport but didn’t drive it much. The model was no longer imported from Italy, so its parts were hard to come by and the car was now so old and frail it seemed increasingly precious to him.
His house sat at the end of the curving drive, lying above a line of trees—stands of pine and oak and eucalyptus—in the cleft of two small rises. It was built back into the hillside on two pieced-together lots, lots so steep they were hitherto deemed unbuildable by the City of Berkeley. The house wasn’t so much on the hill as of it, as Wright would say.
Alec and Carlo had to work for more than two years in order to get a variance. “All right, Alec,” Carlo said at one point. “You’re American, you tell me—who is it I must sleep with in order to get this done?” Carlo, half-Italian, half-British, was born in Surrey, educated at Oxford. He was likable and handsome, the shining, affable partner who presented well, leaving Alec to loom and brood, bite the earpiece of his glasses, grunt, yank his hair.
The glass panels hung before the concrete like a curtain. The concrete walls had been tinted Haze Blue, the surface then burnished to a sheen like the final bright etch of sun clearing away the last licks of fog. Alec had always loved this color. It lay, in both hue and saturation, very close to the metallic paint on the undercarriage of a B-52 bomber—Gina called it camouflage. The house was best at night with everyone at home, when the gray was warmed by incandescent floods. He imagined swooping in, flying toward it, seeing it as another might.
When he was able to imagine it like this, Alec could almost believe in its reality, could imagine it did cohere and that it was more than the sum of the materials and labor costs, that it did rise up and look effortless. It looked effortless, he thought, to everyone but him. Bolted to bedrock, safe as a bunker, he wanted his house to seem to accelerate.
Alec stopped on Spruce to look up past the treetops to pray, Please, God, might I get liftoff ? He didn’t believe in God any more than he believed in perfection or the answer at the end of the square root of two, yet did half-expect God somehow to signal him, for his house to appear to magically levitate as the Taj Mahal is said to do at dawn.
The house was dark, heavy, his dread set in. His mother was in there, visiting. This would be her last trip west. His mother was a nightmare, a sump hole in the Universe. The evening before, upon arriving, she started right in. Viv tipped up her long beak of an aristocratic nose, sniffed at the barrenness of floors, the old and threadbare kelims, the bayside wall of windows. She had been a redhead and her nose was still dramatically freckled. It had grown such knobs and knuckles it now resembled one of her twisted fingers. Herself the daughter of a prosperous butcher and more than a little spoiled, Viv pitied Gina for being an orphan, an urchin, but once kept this more to herself. The night before at dinner, Viv began to rehearse the old complaints, that Gina hadn’t even owned a good winter coat until Alec came along and bought her one. The kids looked startled; Gina smiled brightly, bitterly, at Viv’s condescension.
With the New Haven relatives, Betsy said, Viv could really get going, that Gina went barefoot in all weather—not her fault, no one raised her, what with the mother dying when she was young and the father being a drunk. And this was why Gina didn’t know any better than to nurse the babies in public restaurants.
Alec let himself into a darkened house—Gina clearly had taken the kids and fled. The kitchen was cold; it smelled of apples. Why couldn’t he and Betsy have had a dog when they were kids, why couldn’t they have had real parents?
He found his mother in the living room staring bewilderedly out the window, back on the drapes again, wanting him to help her with the measurements. The sunset across the bay was gaudy and lovely, exactly the kind of thing Viv would somehow find offensive. Viv asked after Alec’s girlfriend—girlfriend or boyfriend is what Viv called Gina or Ben when she, for whatever reason, preferred to pretend not to remember the names of the people her children had married.
“Ma?” Alec asked. “This isn’t about Geee-nah.” He said it very carefully, letting his hand sweep through fading light. “Ma? This is how we like it. I mean the both of us.” His chest felt so constricted with anger he could barely manage to let the words go.
Viv squinted, peered up at Alec. How could two neat, nearly matching people have produced this hulk? At thirteen Alec towered over them. By fourteen he was so tall he’d begun to shadow corners. It was then Alec had begun to feel hunched and odious in his little mother’s presence, as if he bore no physical relationship to her tidy person. Alec very much wanted her to talk about something, anything, aside from Gina, so he wouldn’t have to hate her. New Haven in the old days when she went to the movies at Jimmy’s Nickolette?
Stuart was dead, the house completed years before. What was wrong with his mother that she had to keep having the one same conversation? She kept complaining about Cecily having rats when she hadn’t had rats for years.
“Hey, Ma?” he asked. “How long have you and I been acquainted?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Alec,” Viv said. She seemed irritated at being pinned down like this. “Maybe a dozen years by now?”
Alec was forty-seven years old. He guessed Viv was kidding, though his parents were too carefully behaved and Yaley to have ever come up with much of a sense of humor. He walked quickly to the study, where Betsy was on autodial. He wanted to tell her he figured their parents were clinical narcissists, that this is why the two of them had to raise themselves. He also wanted to check a few things out with her. There was the matter of Viv’s sense of time, that it fell away into absurdities, that she seemed so out of context. He also needed to ask his sister if her little girls had helped with their grandma’s packing.
When