“No budget?”
“Let’s not get crazy.”
“You don’t want cute little houses. What do you want?”
Nick bowed to her, as if ceding the floor. His eyelashes were as long and lovely as she remembered them.
“I’d build apartments.”
“Apartments.”
“Or row houses. Compact, sustainable residences surrounding a public lawn or garden. Pedestrian-friendly sidewalks. A community center. You know, a playground, a pool. Maybe some retail space. I know it’s a sacrilege in these parts, but something to encourage people to get out and walk.”
“Nobody likes to walk,” Nick said with a philosophic shake of his head. “And nobody likes to rent.”
“I rent.”
“You live in the city. Up here, nobody lives in apartments.”
Her face crumpled in amused disbelief.
“The poor and the elderly, okay. But no one else.”
“And we wouldn’t want them on our hands, would we?”
“People think it’s a punishment to live in an apartment. They want the American dream. With a nice big lawn for their neighbors to keep off of.”
They were twenty-two years old. How could he have expected more from her, at twenty-two?
“This is Alluvia,” Claudia said with fresh focus. “You can’t drive ten miles in any direction without hitting a trailer park or a meth lab. You talk about high end, but it’s not exactly the Hamptons set.”
“You’re still a snob.” Then: “The demographic is changing.”
“Well then, so can what the demographic wants.” Claudia willed a shift into lecture mode, tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear, and began. “Nakagin Capsule Tower. Ever heard of it? It’s one of the first buildings I ask my students to study. Not because it’s flawless architecture. It’s not. The apartments are straight-up Stanley Kubrick. Lacquered white walls, built-in reel-to-reels. Very Tokyo. Very 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it’s significant. It was built in the early seventies to house Japanese salarymen. Google it. You’ll see, it points to a completely different concept of living. A completely different set of values. It says you can cook, sleep, eat, shower, even bop along to your reel-to-reel, and you don’t need more than one hundred square feet to do it. You can live life in a — I called it an apartment, but really it’s a pod, a, well, a capsule, an eight-by-twelve—”
“Eight by twelve.” Nick exploded with a guttural laugh.
“See? It’s unimaginable to us.”
“It’s not unimaginable. People do it all the time. In Attica. In Sing Sing.”
“It was an experiment. A failed experiment,” Claudia confessed. “But the idea is compelling.”
“Among Japanese businessmen, maybe. You’re insane, Claude.”
“I’m not talking about building actual pods.”
“Americans,” Nick continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “don’t like identical. I don’t want my pod to look like your pod. I know what you’re going to say: then why do they live in cookie cutter subdivisions. True. But they like the illusion—”
“The myth.”
“The myth.” Nick nodded. “My house is different from yours. My house, my couch, my car — even if they’re exactly the same — are better than yours. It’s why we have ninety-five brands of toilet paper. I’m Charmin. You’re Cottonelle. It’s what makes me me.”
“Ah, the Individual! Let Lady Gaga decide she wants to live in a pod, and you’ll see how many people really want to be an individual. You wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough.”
“So you want me to build the Nagako?”
“Nakagin Capsule Tower.”
“In Alluvia, New York?”
“No. But architecture that questions our use of space is possible. What are we leaving behind? Is it propitious or poisonous? We have the right — the duty, actually — to ask those things. Even here. Even in Alluvia.”
The two of them, facing each other, struck a pose of serious consideration, both sober and unsmiling, until their eyes met and laughter, like water topping a levee, burst forth.
“Propitious,” Nick said as soon as he’d caught his breath. “Propitious!”
“What’s the matter with propitious?”
“All I’ll say is people around here don’t want their houses asking them questions.”
She felt his hand before she saw it move. The heavy warmth of it on her cheek startled her, and before she could stop herself, she pulled away. Stung, Nick no sooner opened his mouth to apologize than Claudia, straining against her seat belt, leapt forward. She clasped his face, the satisfyingly rough plains of silver-flecked stubble, and pulled him into a crude but fervent kiss. Nick fumbled to free himself from his own seat belt without letting his lips leave hers. Loose, he shocked her again by squeezing improbably through the narrow space between the front seats, pawing, like a swimmer reaching for shore, toward the space he called the “way back.” Tumbling over the backseat with a theatrical groan, he hurriedly lowered the seat backs, twice hitting his head, and crawled toward Claudia across the now flat expanse of coarse black carpet. Again, drawn like a magnet, she shot through the same soft leather chasm, pulling Nick with her as she inched her way toward the tailgate, flat on her back, staring into his eyes as he positioned himself over her, helping his fingers move from one button to the next.
Later, the world rushed back to her in the caw of a bird. They lay curled together in the back of the Escalade, slicked in cool sweat.
Claudia stared at the ceiling. Benji would be comforting him by now. Or perhaps Max, beyond comforting, had left. Perhaps he was gone for good.
The harsh, hoarse cry of the bird sounded again, offending her. She made a failing effort to rise to see where it came from. “What is that?” she asked.
“A crow.”
“Awful.”
Nick extended an arm under Claudia’s head, making her a pillow of his sizeable biceps. She cozied up, ignoring the crow, which in most books had to be a bad omen, and breathed in the sweet drugstore spice of cheap soap and a musky something, something long forgotten but rushing back to her now, something fundamentally Nick, that crept (almost imperceptibly) beneath it. “Grab that blanket,” he said.
“What is that?” she asked, not moving, except to bring her foot against the hard, oddly shaped form that the blanket covered. “A body?”
“Not quite.”
“For a second I thought I was in for a threesome.”
“Why? Would you be into that?” Nick asked sleepily. He squeezed her tighter, then said, “It’s Stan.”
Claudia sat up quickly, hitting her own head—“Motherfucker!”—and pulled the blanket from the guitar case. She popped the latches and opened the lid to reveal the battered, honey-brown dreadnought that had sung her to sleep many a night. “Stan.”
They’d had a language all their own that was coming back to them. Shared sounds, tonic endearments, words laced with private meaning that returned to her after all these years.
“Sing me something.”
Without so much as a raised eyebrow, Nick shifted obediently into sitting position, pulled the blanket round Claudia’s shoulders, and took the guitar from her hands. “What’s the lady’s pleasure?” he asked, plucking a few notes to bring the instrument in tune.
“Do you have to ask?”
“Yusuf?” said Nick. “Always Yusuf.” He played a teasing medley of the opening bars of a song that now seemed ineludible.
“Trouble,” he sang.
She was the worst person in the world, the absolute worst. She hadn’t sold missiles to the Taliban or pushed through Tea Party legislation to slam shut the borders. She wasn’t an assassin or serial killer or Ponzi schemer, but as she sat in the parking lot of the Guilderland Travel Plaza, she racked up a list of crimes that seemed to her comparable: