The man at headquarters in Chicago said they were giving him the go-ahead and asked for a fax number. Walter jumped. The Wurster library had one of the new machines; he sprinted over and explained the papers in a rush to Em Ball.

  A work-study student walked in while the new beige machine was clacking and asked, “What’s coming in?”

  “Oh, that’s Walter’s future,” Mrs. Ball said.

  * * *

  —

  The window of the Karmann Ghia didn’t go all the way up, so Walter fastened a seat belt over the papers as he drove to Sausalito. Mr. Wimmer put on his glasses and read while talking on the phone, then hung up and called, “Cheryl! We’re going to Chicago.”

  They sat next to each other on the plane, the plastic gray trays open as Mr. Wimmer reread the paperwork in the small circle of light. When they landed, it was snowing.

  Walter had stayed in a hotel only once before, a Motel 6 at the edge of town, for the funeral of his grandmother long ago. This bed on the twenty-ninth floor was deeply luxurious, but Walter couldn’t sleep. In the morning, he put on the tie Mr. Barsani had given him for Christmas. In a glass tower, they were shown to a conference room with views of the city seamed by fast, evenly falling snow. A long table was set with folders, mechanical pencils, and pens where the knife and spoon would usually be. Uniformed women offered coffee, tea, and rolls from a basket. They were both pretty, like stewardesses.

  The man Walter had talked to on the phone introduced the legal team.

  “You don’t have a lawyer?” he asked Mr. Wimmer.

  “I have a lawyer but I didn’t bring her. I also have a daughter I didn’t bring.”

  Was this non sequitur a joke? People didn’t laugh. Mr. Wimmer took out pictures of Violet, though, and then other men reached for their wallets and the table became cluttered with white-bordered pictures of kids, toothless girls with pigtails, freckled boys, ugly babies, each evidently cherished.

  They finally opened their folders. The headquarters team gave speeches. Mr. Wimmer occasionally scribbled a note. He asked a few questions and each time nodded, accepting their answers. Plates with menus were placed before them by the silent, smiling women. They ate lunch right there, on china with cloth napkins. Until late afternoon, the terms discussed had to do with dates of occupancy, square footage, breach of contract, and penalties. Mr. Wimmer asked for a two-and-a-half-year window for renovation. They demanded occupancy by June 1977. That seemed a long time from now. Mr. Wimmer stayed quiet. There was a round clock on the far wall. Finally, Mr. Wimmer said, “Well, if you need that, we’ll have to get it to you. I’d feel a lot better, though, if we could stretch it to September and split the difference.” Walter wondered if Mr. Wimmer wasn’t a pushover.

  One of the women now pulled down a screen, flicked off the lights, and projected a slide—Walter recognized one of his Polaroids! He looked to Mr. Wimmer. The next slide showed an overlay of the site with proposed parking lots, arrows to indicate streams of entrance and egress, and a truck bay station for deliveries. They talked for an hour about arteries. But where were his drawings?

  Then they projected a slide simulating an all-new building on the site. A sound escaped from Walter. He looked again to Mr. Wimmer. A new building! The beauty of Central was its symmetry and lines. He’d scouted for months to find it. They spoke of “templates” and “the company brand” as the sky outside darkened and someone turned on the lights.

  Walter was relieved when they called it a night; he needed to get alone with Mr. Wimmer. But as the women brought the men their coats, someone named a steakhouse.

  “You’ve got your slaughterhouses here, all right,” Mr. Wimmer said.

  The executives took them to a low-ceilinged restaurant where a saxophone played loudly enough that you didn’t have to talk but if you wanted to hear, you had to lean in to understand. “They’re famous for aged beef,” the man next to him said twice. Everyone ordered martinis. Walter sipped his, which at first tasted like medicine and then became smooth. The saxophone seemed to be pleading, as if the musician understood him. The steaks were enormous, served with baked potatoes and shredded green beans amandine. By the time the waiter took away their plates, the music had stopped. Walter was the only one who ordered dessert. His sundae arrived in a frosted silver-pedestaled bowl with a ceramic pitcher of hot fudge and small ramekins of blanched almonds and whipped cream.

  They all watched him eat.

  Finally, Walter was alone with Mr. Wimmer in a taxi. Suddenly shy, he asked what he thought.

  “Just fine,” Mr. Wimmer said, rapping the file on his lap.

  “But those square boxes are a formula. And Central has a beauty worth preserving. The architects in Wurster love it! This is supposed to be something new, not just another store. We have to fight for the building’s integrity.”

  “The thing I want to fight over is the lease term,” Mr. Wimmer said. “They’re at five years. I want to punch that out to ten. Even fifteen.”

  “Sure. I’m fine with that. But we have to keep Central. At least the edifice. This is my chance to make something.”

  “What you came asking me was how to make money. You wanted to earn a million bucks, if I remember.” Mr. Wimmer took out a pencil and drew numbers on the back of his folder. “A change from five to eight years could end up being worth nine hundred thousand. You want to gussy up pretty buildings, that’s a whole different business. One I’m not in. They have their ideas. Most of those details, I’m inclined to give them. I’d rather get any lease with Sears Roebuck than no lease. Remember, we don’t own anything yet. This could be your first building. They’re not hiring you for your architecture degree.”

  “I don’t have one yet.”

  “Don’t tell them that, either.”

  On the plane home, a stewardess brought them each a warm chocolate chip cookie. Mr. Wimmer mentioned that negotiating a commercial lease generally took three to four months. The sixty-one-page contract stipulated square footage of the building and the parking lot, entrance and egress, and a thousand other details regarding plumbing, loading facilities, and electrical grids, but it didn’t explicitly say new construction. Mr. Wimmer knocked on the folder. “We’ll take this letter of intent to the bank and we’ll have a mortgage for 110 percent of the purchase price. We’ve already doubled the value. It’s a no-brainer for the loan officer.”

  Snow fizzed outside the small oblong window. Carrie didn’t love him, Walter remembered, and she was the first woman he’d loved. But he had this.

  49.

  A sound wove in and out of Walter’s dream. Eventually it became the telephone. Someone wanted something. He slid down the knotted rope.

  “Are you coming?” Susan’s voice, but smaller.

  The Winter Ball. Walter and Mr. Wimmer had landed in the afternoon. Walter had taken BART, then walked to campus and went straight to bed. He’d forgotten all about the dance. “Be right there,” he said.

  She was sitting alone in a cream-colored velvet gown, her arms long and bare, like a portrait, her hands on her lap, fiddling with pearls. Understanding sifted into him: he was very late. He hadn’t picked up the suit from the Princeton Shop. She must be furious. She’d always been there, first an annoying girl who raised her hand in class, then a friend so constant that being with her was like being alone. But tonight, she didn’t look like herself.

  “Should we still go?” he asked.

  “They’ll have finished eating. People will be dancing.” She was mad.

  “I’m a pretty bad dancer.”

  The dress was tight, the small mound of her stomach newly revealed and sexual. They decided not to drive to the Oakland ballroom. Instead, they stayed sitting in two wing chairs, like parents waiting for teenagers to come home. He told her what had happened in Chicago, remembering Mr. Wimmer taking out the picture of his daughter. He explained the letter of intent. She stood up to get a paper and pen and smoothed her dress over her hips before sitting again. He wrote the numbers, subtracted taxes, federal, municipal, and state, as Mr. Wimmer had explained to him, estimating electricity and power. It still left a huge profit. “That can’t be right. I guess the big question is renovation versus new construction, which turns out to be cheaper. I’m the only one who cares if it’s beautiful. And every added dollar of renovation comes out of what I earn.”

  Susan wanted him to talk to her father. Or a lawyer. Both. She said that twice, then admitted she was starving. They decided to go for hamburgers.

  The night marked another beginning. A hundred times, he’d thought about lifting the hair from Carrie’s neck and bending down to kiss her, but now, with Susan, he imagined more carnal movements. He wanted to cup the small mound of her belly from behind and pull her against him. He felt his body in his pants and followed her upstairs.

  She emerged from her closet in tailored slacks, loafers, and a ribbed sweater, still with her formal earrings on. She asked him to open the tiny clasp of her pearl necklace. Her neck smelled like fresh green peas. He’d always thought she was uptight. Sure of herself. Too something. But tonight corners were melting.

  They both knew that this was a date. They walked up the hill to the Claremont Hotel.

  Walter understood that he was someone who could always take on more. The addition of a new job calmed him. Still, Susan argued, this was different. “You really have to call my dad,” she said. “They’re in real estate. It’s what they do.”

  He’d always known Susan liked him. He could say anything to her. But he’d drawn a line around himself. That had made it easy to be close. She’d climbed up the rope ladder and seen his Pelican loft with the bed unmade. She’d probably seen Carrie’s poem, framed. He’d gotten nowhere with love and now he was twenty.

  They ate cheeseburgers in the hotel dining room, sipping from goblets of red wine. Over a dessert they split, she fought with him about his design, her spoon aggressive in the sundae dish, digging around the bottom corners. He wanted to show her; he had close-ups of the building, but not here, back in the Pelican. So he drew the layout on a napkin.

  “That doesn’t look like a store. It looks like a high school.”

  “So people can shop in a place with history. Everyone remembers high school.”

  “Not necessarily fondly. I think if it’s important to you that this works, do it their way.”

  “Their way is a shoebox. They have dozens of them already.”

  “I kind of like the one in Santa Monica.”

  She kept up with this long after Ken would have said, Do what you want. Even if what Walter wanted wasn’t best for him. Walter felt an inkling of what this could be: someone who fought to tell you the truth you didn’t want to hear, because she had a stake in your future. He picked up the check. She didn’t lift her purse. It was a date, all right.

  The walk back to the sorority was downhill, but cold. “The problem with walking,” Susan said, “is walking back.” At the door she said, “I’m scared.”

  Under the streetlight, diffused in fog, her earrings glowed. Friendship was the word that came to mind, not love, but friendship with a halo. He could imagine dinners like this, her leaning in to listen and then giving advice, her voice sharp, for his benefit. Almost involuntarily, he moved toward her face, a buzzing feeling; he tried to aim for the side of her mouth, not straight on, but her lips caught his. Kissing Susan could change everything.

  * * *

  —

  “You got them to sign a lease for a building you don’t own?” Susan’s father sounded surprised.

  “I guess we own it now,” Walter said. Just saying that—that he was an owner—started a wave of dizziness close to nausea. The bank had approved the loan, 110 percent, as Mr. Wimmer predicted. Lina had called the morning Walter skipped class to BART over to the city to sign papers. “How’s school?” he’d asked her, and only half listened to her answer as he stretched the cord to the mirror above the sink and tied his tie, the way he’d learned from tying other people’s at the Princeton Shop. It was different on your own neck.

  Now, sitting in the room Susan shared with Carrie, he scanned the small print of the sixty-one-page contract. “It doesn’t say we own it. It says we promise to deliver the building September 1, 1977.” Mr. Wimmer hadn’t claimed anything untrue. What would he have done if the men in Chicago had asked when they’d bought the building? For almost an hour, Walter talked to Susan’s father, whose dark, fast-moving legs he remembered from the day they left for college, and who now delivered the death sentence for his dream. “You won’t get earthquake insurance, not for a California brick building constructed before World War Two.”

  “The wrecking ball,” he said when Susan returned. “I did twenty-seven drawings to scale. That beautiful building. If only it weren’t brick.”

  “Kill your darlings.”

  They hadn’t had sex yet or even made out lying down so that the points of their bodies touched, but that would probably come. Thinking of this gave their conversations gentle electricity, like the tickle of a feather.

  Mr. Wimmer had arranged the loan through his banker. He owned 15 percent of the project. He’d given Walter two names for general contractors in the counties closest to the site, but despite regular invitations, he still hadn’t seen Central. “It’s your building,” he said. Before winter quarter midterms, Walter would have to hire his GC, file for permits, and draw mechanicals. Em Ball hired Rory for tea and cookies. The lady poet gave him a reference. Quitting the film archive turned out to be so easy it was insulting. Before Walter had finished explaining, his boss started filling in his blocks on the schedule. All along he’d been that replaceable.

  The Princeton Shop would probably have to go. “You’re not in college to become a suit salesman,” Em Ball said.

  But it was only Saturdays and Walter still coveted that promised suit. “For a graduation I probably won’t have.”

  There was no way he could graduate in June.

  * * *

  —

  Walter called Mr. Wimmer to ask him again to come to see Central. He offered to pick him up in Marin. Mr. Wimmer was leaving, though, to appear as Santa Claus at the Sausalito shopping center he’d built. He did this every year. Walter had forgotten his wife’s obsession with Christmas.

  50.

  Outside the airplane window, snow continued to bullet down. The pilot announced another delay. All the months Lina hadn’t seen her mother weighed on her, as people rustled in their seats. By the time the plane taxied on the runway (a wing’s red lights blinking), it was three hours late.

  Julie was waiting at LAX. Dinner was ready at home, she said, they’d head down to Norwalk tomorrow, but Lina had to see her mother tonight. She asked to borrow the car. Julie insisted on driving. She’d pack up dinner, she said.

  “What about Donnie?”

  “I’ll leave his on the table. He knows.” She left a large portion in a glass casserole.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Julie knew where to park. She lagged behind as Lina ran to the parlor, where her mother sat with a blanket covering her lap.

  Lina fell on her. For a long minute, it felt good to cry. But when she opened her eyes, her mother looked fearful. She had raised her arm, as if to protect herself.

  “It’s me, Mom,” Lina said. Had she forgotten?

  “Oh, hi,” her mother said, playing along.

  Lina took in more now. She didn’t recognize one article of clothing her mother had on, and in these other garments—which must have belonged originally to other patients—her body looked different, too. Her cheeks were fuller, burying the bones of her face.

  Julie stepped closer, carrying the bags of food. “Here’s Lina, her plane was late. Come, Diane, we brought dinner.” Julie knew where to find plates in the dim kitchen. The three of them sat at a long table and ate an Indian chicken dish, delicately spiced.

  Julie said she made larger portions now and brought some of whatever turned out to Diane. “She enjoys it,” she said. “Her sense of taste is, if anything, more.”

  * * *

  —

  During the Christmas show and dinner, Lina’s mother ignored her.

  “She’s mad,” Julie said. “You were gone. She can be like a child.”

  Her mother wanted Donnie to walk her back to 301 to bed.

  Christmas morning, they drove down again with presents for their mom and the cat. Julie brought food that they ate at a picnic table outside. Her mother seemed to accept Lina now the way she accepted Julie, as an acquaintance to whom she had to be polite. She remembered Walter.

  He shook his head. “You got to stop waiting for her to come back the way she was,” he said. “We’ve got to move on.”

  Before they left, Lina stopped by her mother’s bed. There were pictures taped on the bare wall: Walter at graduation, her mom as a girl on a bike, she and Julie in their pointed white caps the day they graduated as nurses.

  * * *

  —

  Walter, Lina, and Donnie went to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  “It isn’t like that,” Donnie said, coming out of the theater.

  “Those people weren’t real,” Lina said. “They were comically crazy.”

  “Like to see the Norwalk guys on a basketball court,” Donnie said. “And that nurse.”

  Walter asked Lina, “So everything’s still okay at school?” If all went right, according to the lease he kept in an accordion file, he could pay for her last year of tuition.

  “I love it,” she said.