A Place of My Own Read Online Free Page B

not outright fear, seriously wondering whether this man wasn’t really Ahab disguised as an architect, piloting us all toward certain ruin in quest of some dubious ideal only he completely understood.
    But on this particular April morning I was taking the more benign view, at least to start. After going completely roofless for the better part of March, our bedroom was at last starting to resemble a room. Charlie was down from Cambridge on one of his monthly site inspections; when I arrived, his Trooper was already beached in the crisscrossed field of mud that had formerly been our front lawn. His car looked lived in, its backseat buried beneath a heap of rolled-up blueprints, action figures (Charlie has two boys), Styrofoam coffee cups, and wadded cigarette packs. After climbing the contractor’s rickety extension ladder and stepping out onto the new plywood subfloor, I saw Charlie’s bearish frame in the new window opening; clomping from one boot to the other to keep warm, he was peering out at the early spring landscape, still only incipiently green, with a cigarette cupped in his hand. This was the first time either of us had had the chance to glimpse what amounted to an entirely fresh perspective on the property—the startlingly new landscape a well-placed window can create. One of the aims of Charlie’s design had been to redirect the house’s gaze away from the road in front and back toward the hillside and our gardens, and it was clear from here that he had succeeded.
    Charlie greeted me with his customary “Hey,” a quick throaty bark he somehow manages to work some warmth into. He immediately dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the plywood with his boot. I’ve told him maybe a half-dozen times his smoking doesn’t bother me, and anyway the “room” we were standing in was wide open to the weather, but Charlie likes to think of himself as someone who’s quit, so he allows himself to smoke only in the car or outdoors, and then only when alone. This was an accommodation that seemed very much in character, especially in the way it carefully layered an intricate regime of self-discipline over the absence of that very quality. In Charlie the supreme self-control and orderliness I associate with architects seems to be at constant logger-heads with deeper forces and appetites that he is too much a creature of the senses to master completely.
    It is a contest that is perhaps most openly waged in his attire, which despite his best efforts invariably puts you in mind of a hastily made bed. This morning, for example, Charlie had on under his suede jacket a very sharp new J. Crew shirt, but already it was climbing up out of his chinos, which were themselves riding alarmingly low. The man’s rumpledness is so deep-seated it would probably defeat Armani, assuming Charlie could afford such tailoring; he’s just too baggy and lumbering a guy. He’s also too much of a Yankee: Charlie’s the kind of New Englander (he grew up in Cambridge, in a family of Quakers that came to Massachusetts in 1650) for whom the absolute worst thing you can say about someone, or something, is that it’s pretentious.
    Not that this makes him the least bit careless about his presentation; to the contrary, Charlie has the architect’s clichéd self-consciousness about image and sensitivity to detail; it’s just that he’s loathe to come across that way. In fact he considers it a high compliment whenever a client tells him he doesn’t seem like an architect, since what people usually mean by this is that he listens well, is practical-minded, and prizes comfort as much as beauty. ( Comf’table , pronounced in a cushy three-syllable version, is a favorite word; so is neat , deployed strictly as a superlative.) And, anyway, with two hundred hirsute pounds distributed somewhat unevenly over a six-foot frame, and a face of unusual sympathy and expressiveness—it’s animated by a footloose pair of shrubby eyebrows that almost touch in