Chapter 17
BIRDIE
Bell lives where the Kansas River and Missouri River meet, in a basin of warehouses and old factories.
Far up—so far up that it seems like a fairy-tale city, like the spires of Cair Paravel or Minas Tirith—Kansas City glitters atop the steep river bluffs, the version of Kansas City that gets put on postcards and labels stuck to bottles of barbecue sauce.
But down here, where Bell expertly navigates his truck through the warren of old stockyards and abandoned railroad buildings and barely used port facilities, this is where Kansas City started.
Where Lewis and Clark camped on their way west. Where the money was made in cattle and trade and trains before anyone ever thought of making a town for a town’s sake.
I’ve been to the river bottoms a few times—usually on the hunt for reclaimed lumber—and I never could have imagined this being where Ryan Bell lives.
I guess I thought…maybe a sleek penthouse with an imported kitchen and a far view over a forest of concrete and glass?
Or one of those infill houses erected on the graves of old bungalows, all skinny and faux mid-century and magazine bait-y?
The kind of place I imagined a buzzy young architect would gravitate toward.
But no. We park in front of a low-slung brick building on a street so potholed that the asphalt might as well be gravel at this point.
An even lower-slung building of concrete is attached to the north, some graffiti on its walls.
Several blocks south, I see a glut of cars; they’re near the antique stores that have worked their way into the river bottoms over the last decade.
The cars remind me that it’s a Saturday.
Other people are out enjoying a day off, shopping for things they don’t need, thinking idly about where to eat dinner.
And I’m being driven to a cage with semen crusting in my hair like sea salt.
Ryan gets out of the truck and comes around my side to open my door.
A true gentleman, I think bitterly. A gentleman who didn’t let me try to clean up the mess he made on me, who carefully replaced my bra and tank top as if to hold his ejaculate in place against my skin.
The gore of my bra is still wet, and there’s a sticky spot on the front of my tank top with stiff edges where it’s started to dry.
I hide a flinch as he helps me step out of the truck and my torn-up calf takes my weight again, and I force myself to move easily, like someone unhurt, as I drop his hand and step back.
I chance a look at his face, and my bitterness is doubled.
It’s not fair that God made him so beautiful, so pure looking, in the shape of goodness itself.
It’s not fair that he should look like that and be talented and be successful and have the ability to talk someone into selling their body for a year.
He grabs my duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder, locks the truck, and then uses a hand at the small of my back to guide me to a door in the middle of the brick building.
It’s newly fitted, I can tell immediately, the wood neatly joined and freshly painted in a pretty green.
There’s a transom window above, the glass unwarped and frosted for privacy.
The whole building, actually, has a feeling of freshness—the old brick has been carefully repointed, and while some window glass is obviously original, the black metal casings are new.
I still expect something a little pretentious inside, perhaps a little bit of that infill-housing aesthetic, but when he unlocks the door and gestures for me to step inside, I find a space so interesting and layered and organic that I stop in the middle of the doorway just to stare.
He laughs. “Come on, little artist. You can stroke my ego, but after I’ve closed the door and kept some of the air-conditioning in my house.”
House doesn’t do it justice, but there’s almost no other word that’s right for it.
I allow myself to be nudged in so Bell can shut the door, but I don’t make it very far.
Just a few steps and then I’m arrested again, taking everything in with a pleasure I haven’t felt in so, so long—an artist’s pleasure.
He hasn’t made this warehouse into a statement piece, into a pastiche or a mimicry of something it never was. He’s only made it more itself.
Transoms in the middles of the windows to let in air before the era of air-conditioning, a height that suggests the windows originally spanned two stories, with graceful, curved tops to support the weight of the brickwork above.
The floors too are original, wide floorboards at the far end, where I think offices might have been once upon a time, and brick along the entryway and through the first half.
One of the largest windows is behind me, tall and wide and arched—a freight door at one point, perhaps with a ramp for wagons to be rolled in.
The sealed brick is worn and uneven, as if it’s been deformed with wheels and cargo over the years.
The ceilings are high, since most of the warehouse is open all the way up to the wooden rafters.
Skylights let sunlight puddle on the brick and wood below, although Bell’s used a kind of glass that seems to filter out the worst of the heat.
The walls are the same brick as the outside, and they’re made even more personal by the bookshelves mounted between the windows and along the large stretch of interior wall at the far end.
Everywhere else, there is art big and small, some of it framed, some of it just stretched canvas.
Bell loves art. I knew it when he was my student, but this…this is more than a bachelor looking to impress coworkers and dates. This is someone who really, truly loves expression. Vision. Color and depth and point of view.
Architecturally, there are insertions, but they feel so contextual, so necessary, that they only highlight the loveliness of the building’s history rather than undermining it.
A mezzanine floor has been built toward the back, with a black metal bridge stretching through the open air between what I think are bedrooms. A section of wall near what is furnished as a living area has been replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass, revealing a private brick courtyard with a table, chairs, and a few small trees.
A brick path framed by plants twists out of sight.
Over on the wooden floors, a square room walled with glass reveals a home office—computer desk, drafting table, shelves with as many binders and bound plans as books.
The kitchen is another insertion, but he hasn’t fitted in a Scandi prefab or something with imported marble.
The cabinets look homemade, with open shelves above and a large kitchen island with a butcher block counter that’s too patinaed to be new.
A chandelier hangs above the table—vintage and interesting but not ostentatious.
It looks like it was salvaged by someone who liked it, rather than by someone who wanted to feel smug about all the reclaimed things in their house.
My eyes come back to the multipaned wall of glass looking out to the courtyard, and then I realize Bell is watching me, looking at me look at his home. His gaze is intense but there’s a trace of a smile on his mouth.
It’s a little self-satisfied, but I won’t begrudge him his arrogance about this.
“It’s perfect,” I say without really meaning to.
I’ve never been good at this kind of conversation, the in-between things meant more as lubricant than an actual exchange, but this feels less like small talk and more like looking at his work, and not as a teacher but as a sort of peer.
“You’ve found the light and the space, but you kept its particulars. ”
The smile grows, mischievous. There would be no drawing that mouth without curves.
Even at rest, the edges flick upward like the tip of a leaf or a flourish at the end of a word, and no matter what, that lower lip is slightly too lush, like it was painted by Raphael when no one was around to tell him to settle down.
“I let it speak for itself,” he says. “Just like my teacher said to.” He winks at me before he steps away to drop my duffel bag at the foot of the stairs leading up to the mezzanine level, and blood rushes to my cheeks.
I still have his semen drying on my shirt and in my hair—he bought me for sex—and I’m blushing because he winked at me.
I’m pathetic.
“Come,” he says, striding back toward me with his hand outstretched.
I hesitate. I don’t know why, because it’s not as if he hasn’t had that hand full of my breast today, it’s not as if I haven’t sold him sex for a year, but something about this feels so intentional, so sober, and also I feel suddenly too shy, too perceived.
I want to hug my arms around myself; I want to ask where my bedroom is so I can hide.
Bell comes closer anyway, the smile on his face only growing as he reaches me and takes my hand for himself, his grip large and warm and dry.
He doesn’t seem upset that I didn’t come toward him, that I was too nervous to put my hand in his.
Maybe it comes with being Ryan Bell, being so axiomatically attractive and clever and beguiling that you never have to wonder if you’re the reason someone is prickly or awkward or rude.
Of course it can’t be you. Of course it must be a glitch inside them.
I am grateful for it, though, the way he can take one of my odd, lonely moments and slip so gracefully through the breach and back out again, taking me with him.
Busy used to do that for me when we were young, before Dad died and everything began to change.
Kaitlyn would too but impatiently, like I was a timid dog that needed to be half dragged through a noisy park.
He leads me in the direction of his glassed-in office, but we go past it to the far brick wall that marks the end of the warehouse.
There is a new door there, fireproof and painted a berry red.
He opens it and pulls me through, and then we’re in a completely different building—the one-story attached building I saw when we parked.
The floors are a smooth, sealed concrete, and there are windows everywhere, taking up most of the north wall and with a glass horseshoe of clerestory windows above.
And the wood—the wood. Big blocks of basswood, seasoned and laminated and ready for a chisel.
A block of mahogany, a block of walnut, and one that appears to be redwood.
Everything else is here too: long worktables, stepladders, chisels, gouges, tracing paper, clay.
Power tools cluster stoically at one end of the room, and a ring of discreet ductwork leads to a wall-mounted dust collection system, better than the one I have in the barn by a large order of magnitude.
“It’s a studio,” I whisper, looking at everything greedily, almost wildly, my pulse in my throat.
“It’s your studio,” he corrects me. When I look back at him, his smile has faded somewhat, and he looks almost nervous.
“I know you said you had a studio set up for me, but—”
But I didn’t believe him. But I never could have imagined something this nice.
Something better than my old, lightless barn, better even than the studio at Evelyn, which always felt temporary, borrowed, a hotel room for my mind rather than a home.
But this…the light, so much northern light, and the openness, the way it all seems to breathe.
“I want to make it perfect for you, so we can change anything you’d like, anything at all.
I had the floor poured new so it would be completely level, and there’s a new exhaust system too, which I think should be sufficient even if you’re varnishing or oiling a few things at a time, but we can always add to it if we need.
” He’s speaking quickly, rushing a little, and he’s dropped my hand to wave at the space, at the things that must have cost so much time and money to have installed.
“I know basswood is the best, and we can get more, but I thought the mahogany and walnut would be nice for variety, and that redwood is deadfall from a storm a while back. A friend of mine on the coast got it for me. And the studio has its own entrance, just there, see? Next to the freight door, and it’s level with the street, so there shouldn’t be any issue getting a sculpture loaded for transportation or getting new blocks in. ”
“Bell,” I say softly, and then: “Ry.”
He licks his lower lip and traps that lip briefly between his teeth before looking over at me. Perhaps I was wrong earlier about him having a preternatural sense of self-confidence because he’s more nervous showing me this studio than he was asking me if he could pay me to spend a year in his bed.
“It’s wonderful,” I say and offer him a small smile. “Really. You’ve thought of everything, and it’s exactly the studio I would make for myself if I could.”
Relief breaks like sunshine across his face, and I’m given a dimple in his strong cheek. His jaw pops a little, but like he’s trying not to smile too widely.
“Good.” He doesn’t extend his hand in offer this time; he simply reaches forward and wraps his fingers around mine and then guides me gently back to the door. “That makes me very happy to hear.”
I look around again before we go back to the warehouse. The new concrete floor, poured with a sculptor’s needs in mind. The cyclone system for sucking up sawdust. The redwood deadfall. “You couldn’t have had this done between when you found my address and this morning,” I say.
It’s not a question, but it’s also not not a question, but Bell doesn’t answer the underlying query.
“No,” he says without looking at me. “I couldn’t have.”