Knocking twice at the door, Gil enters without awaiting a reply. We follow him into the warm light of the room, where Brooks Franklin, Gil's portly vice president, sits at a long mahogany table extending lengthwise just past the door. Atop the table stand a Tiffany lamp and a phone. Around its edge are tucked six chairs.
I'm glad you showed up when you did, Brooks says to all of us, politely ignoring the fact that Paul is wearing women's clothes. Parker was telling me his costume plans for tomorrow night, and I was starting to think I might need backup.
I don't know Brooks very well, but ever since we shared an introductory economics class sophomore year, he has related to me as an old friend. I'm guessing that Parker's plans have to do with Saturday's dance, which is traditionally a Princeton-themed costume ball.
You'll fucking die, Gil, Parker says, arriving unannounced from downstairs. Now he has a cigarette in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. At least you have a sense of humor.
He speaks directly to Gil, as if Paul and I are invisible. Down at the table, I can see Brooks shaking his head.
I've decided to come as JFK, he continues. And my date's not going to be Jackie. She's going to be Marilyn Monroe.
Parker must see confusion in my expression, because he dashes his cigarette into an ashtray on the table. Yes, Tom, he says, Kennedy graduated from Harvard. But he went here his freshman year.
The latest product of a California wine family that has sent a son to Princeton, and to Ivy, for generations, Parker cleared both of those hurdles thanks only to what Gil, charitably, calls the Hassett family's momentum.
Before I can respond, Gil leans forward.
Look, Parker, I don't have time for this. If you want to come as Kennedy, that's your business. Just try to show some taste.
Parker, who seemed to expect something better, shoots a sour look at all of us and walks off, wine in hand.
Brooks, Gil says now, can you go down and ask Albert if there's any dinner left? We haven't eaten and we're in a rush.
Brooks agrees. He is the perfect vice president: obliging, tireless, loyal. Even when Gil's favors come out sounding like commands, he never seems to be ruffled. Tonight is the only time he has ever looked weary to me, and I wonder if he just finished his thesis.
Actually, Gil adds, looking up, I'll bring two of them up here, and eat mine in the dining room. We can talk about the wine order for tomorrow while I eat.
Brooks turns to Paul and me. Good to see you guys, he says. Sorry about Parker. I don't know what gets into him sometimes.
Sometimes? I say under my breath.
Brooks must hear me, because he smiles before leaving.
The food should be ready in a few minutes, Gil says. I'll be downstairs if you guys need me. He focuses on Paul. We can go to the lecture as soon as you're ready.
For a second after he leaves, I can't escape the feeling that Paul and I are committing some kind of fraud. We're sitting at an antique mahogany table in a nineteenth-century mansion, waiting for someone to bring us our dinners. If I had a nickel for every time this had happened to me since I got to Princeton, I would need another one to rub the two together. Cloister Inn, the club where Charlie and I are members, is a small, simple building with a cozy stone charm. When the floors are polished and the greens are trimmed it's a respectable place to draw a beer or shoot some pool. But in scale and in gravity it is dwarfed by Ivy. Our chef's first priority is quantity, not quality, and unlike our Ivy friends we eat where we please, rather than being seated in the order of our arrival. Half of our chairs are plastic, all of our cutlery is replaceable, and sometimes when the parties we throw are too expensive, or the taps we run are too loose, we find hot dogs in the lunch tray on Fridays. We are like many of the clubs on the street. Ivy has always been the exception.
Come downstairs with me, Paul says abruptly.
Unsure what he means by it, I follow. We descend past the stained-glass window that runs along the south landing, then down another flight of stairs into the basement of the club. Paul leads me through the hall toward the President's Room. Gil is supposed to have sole access to the room, but when Paul worried about having less and less privacy at his library carrel while trying to finish his thesis, Gil promised him a copy of the key, hoping to lure him back to the club. Paul had found little to recommend Ivy by then, work-obsessed as he was. But the President's Room, large and quiet and accessible to Paul directly through the steam tunnels, was a blessing he couldn't refuse. Others protested that Gil had made a hostel of the club's most exclusive room, but Paul defused all controversy by arriving at the room almost always through the tunnels. It seemed to bother the offended parties less when they didn't have to see him come and go.
As we arrive in front of the door, Paul pops the lock open with his key. Shuffling in behind him, I'm caught by surprise. It's been weeks since I've seen the place. The first thing I remember is how cold it is. Here, in what is effectively the club's cellar, temperatures hover uncomfortably close to freezing. Exclusive or no, the room looks like it's been hit by a hurricane of letters. Books have settled on every surface like mounds of debris: the shelves of Ivy's moldering European and American classics are almost obscured by Paul's reference books, historical journals, nautical maps, and stray blueprint designs.
He closes the door behind us. Beside the desk is a handsome fireplace, and the clutter of papers is so heavy here that some of the titles are bleeding onto the hearth. Still, when Paul scans the room, he seems pleased; everything is as he left it. He walks over and picks up The Poetry of Michelangelo from the floor, brushes some paint chips off the cover, and places it carefully on his desk. Finding a long wooden match atop the mantel, he strikes the head and reaches down into the fireplace, where a blue flame breathes life into old newsprint weighted with logs.
You've done a lot, I tell him, looking at one of the more detailed blueprints unraveled across his desk.
He frowns. That's nothing. I've made a dozen like that, and they're probably all wrong. I do it when I feel like giving up.
What I'm looking at is a drawing of a building Paul invented. The edifice is stitched together from the ruins of buildings mentioned in the Hypnerotomachia: broken arches have been restored; riddled foundations are strong again; columns and capitals, once shattered, now find themselves repaired. There is an entire pile of blueprints beneath it, each one assembled the same way from the odds and ends of Colonna's imagination, each one different. Paul has created a landscape to live in down here, an Italy of his own. On the walls are taped other sketches, some hidden by notes he has affixed over them. In each one the lines are studiously architectural, measured in units I don't understand. A computer could have produced all of them, the proportions are so perfect, the script is so careful. But Paul, who claims to be suspicious of computers, has actually never been able to afford his own, and politely refused Curry's offer to buy him one. Everything here has been drawn by hand.
What are they supposed to be? I ask.
The building Francesco is designing.
I'd almost forgotten Paul's habit of referring to Colonna in the present tense, always using the man's first name.
What building?
Francesco's crypt. The first half of the Hypnerotomachia says he's designing it. Remember?
Of course. You think it looks like these? I ask, gesturing at the drawings.