Brian led her up four flights of metal stairs, unpadlocked another door, and led her into a warmer space where the reverb had train-station or cathedral grandeur. The air tasted of dry molds that fed on dry molds that fed on dry molds.
When Brian unblinded her, she knew immediately where she was. The Philadelphia Electric Company in the seventies had decommissioned its dirty-coal power plants — majestic buildings, like this one just south of Center City, that Denise slowed down to admire whenever she drove by. The space was bright and vast. The ceiling was sixty feet up, and Chartres-like banks of high windows punctuated the northern and southern walls. The concrete floor had been serially repatched and deeply gouged by materials even harder than itself; it was more like a terrain than a floor. In the middle of it were the exoskeletal remains of two boiler-and-turbine units that looked like house-size crickets stripped of limbs and feelers. Eroded black electromotive oblongs of lost capability. At the river end of the space were giant hatches where the coal had come in and the ashes had gone out. Traces of absent chutes and ducts and staircases brightened the smoky walls.
Denise shook her head. “You can’t put a restaurant in here.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“You’re going to lose your money before I have a chance to lose it myself.”
“I might get some bank funding, too.”
“Not to mention the PCBs and asbestos we’re inhaling as we speak.”
“There you’re wrong,” Brian said. “This place wouldn’t be available if it qualified for Superfund money. Without Superfund money, PECO can’t afford to tear it down. It’s too clean.”
“Bummer for PECO.” She approached the turbines, loving the space regardless of its suitability. The industrial decay of Philadelphia, the rotting enchantments of the Workshop of the World, the survival of mega ruins in micro times: she recognized the mood from having been born into a family of older people who kept mothballed wool and iron things in ancient boxes in the basement. She’d gone to school in a bright modernity and come home every day to an older, darker world.
“You can’t heat it, you can’t cool it,” she said. “It’s a utility-bill nightmare.”
Brian, retriever, watched her intently. “My architect says we can run a floor along the entire south wall of windows. Come out about fifty feet. Glass it in on the other three sides. Put the kitchen underneath. Steam-clean the turbines, hang some spots, and let the main space just be itself.”
“This is so totally a money pit.”
“Notice there aren’t any pigeons,” Brian said. “No puddles.”
“But figure a year for the permits, another year to build, another year to get inspected. That’s a long time to pay me for nothing.”
Brian replied that he was aiming for a February opening. He had architect friends and contractor friends, and he foresaw no trouble with “L&I”—the dreaded city office of Licenses and Inspections. “The commissioner,” he said, “is a friend of my dad’s. They golf every Thursday.”
Denise laughed. Brian’s ambition and competence, to use a word of her mother’s, “tickled” her. She looked up at the arching tops of the windows. “I don’t know what kind of food you think is going to work in here.”
“Something decadent and grand. That’s your problem to solve.”
When they returned to the car, the greenness of which was of a piece with the weeds around the empty gravel lot, Brian asked if she’d made plans for Europe. “You should take at least two months,” he said. “I have an ulterior motive here.”
“Yes?”
“If you go, then I can go for a couple of weeks myself. I want to eat what you eat. I want to hear how you think.”
He said this with disarming self-interest. Who wouldn’t want to travel in Europe with a pretty woman who knew her food and wine? If you, not he, were the lucky devil who got to do it, he would be as delighted for you as he expected you, now, to be delighted for him. This was his tone.
The part of Denise that suspected she might have better sex with Brian than she’d had with other men, the part of her that recognized her own ambition in him, agreed to take six weeks in Europe and connect with him in Paris.
The other, more suspicious part of her said: “When am I going to meet your family?”
“How about next weekend? Come out and see us at Cape May.”
Cape May, New Jersey, consisted of a core of over-decorated Victorians and fashionably shabby bungalows surrounded by new printed-circuit tracts of vile boom. Naturally, being Brian’s parents, the Callahans owned one of the best old bungalows. Behind it was a pool for early-summer weekends when the ocean was cold. Here Denise, arriving late on a Saturday afternoon, found Brian and his daughters lounging while a mouse-haired woman, covered with sweat and rust, attacked a wrought-iron table with a wire brush.
Denise had expected Brian’s wife to be ironic and stylish and something of a knockout. Robin Passafaro was wearing yellow sweat pants, an MAB paint cap, a Phillies jersey of unflattering redness, and terrible glasses. She wiped her hand on her sweats and gave it to Denise. Her greeting was squeaky and oddly formaclass="underline" “It’s very nice to meet you.” She went immediately back to work.
I don’t like you either, Denise thought.
Sinéad, a skinny pretty girl of ten, was sitting on the diving board with a book in her lap. She waved carefully at Denise. Erin, a younger and chunkier girl wearing headphones, was hunched over a picnic table with a scowl of concentration. She gave a low whistle.
“Erin’s learning birdcalls,” Brian said.
“Why?”
“Basically, we have no idea.”
“Magpie,” Erin announced. “Queg-queg-queg-queg?”
“This might be a good time to put that away,” Brian said.
Erin peeled off her headphones, ran to the diving board, and tried to bounce her sister off it. Sinéad’s book nearly went into the soup. She snagged it with an elegant hand. “Dad—!”
“Honey, it’s a diving board, not a reading board.”
There was a coked-up fast-forwardness to Robin’s brushing. Her work seemed pointed and resentful and it set Denise’s nerves on edge. Brian, too, sighed and considered his wife. “Are you almost done with that?”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“That would be nice, yes.”
“OK.” Robin dropped the brush and moved toward the house. “Denise, can I get you something to drink?”
“Glass of water, thanks.”
“Erin, listen,” Sinéad said. “I’ll be a black hole and you be a red dwarf.”
“I want to be a black hole,” Erin said.
“No, I’m the black hole. The red dwarf runs around in circles and gradually gets sucked in by powerful gravitational forces. The black hole sits here and reads.”
“Do we collide?” Erin said.
“Yes,” Brian interposed, “but no information about the event ever reaches the outside world. It’s a perfectly silent collision.”
Robin reappeared in a black one-piece swimsuit. With a gesture just short of rude, she gave Denise her water.
“Thank you,” Denise said.
“You’re welcome!” Robin said. She took off her glasses and dove into the deep end. She swam underwater while Erin circled the pool and emitted shrieks appropriate to a dying M-or S-class star. When Robin surfaced at the shallow end she looked naked in her semi-blindness. She looked more like the wife Denise had imagined — hair pouring in rivers down her head and shoulders, her cheekbones and dark eyebrows gleaming. As she left the pool, water beaded on the hemming of her suit and streamed through the untended hairs of her bikini line.