Chapter 12 — The Question She Doesnt Ask #2
Damon was still there. He appeared from the corridor with two coffees, the cart three blocks east, the same place they had been going since week one, and set hers on the site table and came to stand beside her looking up at the plasterwork.
She accepted the coffee. They stood in the lobby and looked up and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"The ironwork delivery is in three weeks," she said.
"I know."
"The staircase reveal on Friday will change the entry sequence significantly. I want to photograph the lobby from the entrance point before and after, the visual axis shifts when the staircase becomes visible."
"You'll have what you need," he said.
She drank her coffee. The afternoon light was coming through the glass entrance doors at the November angle, lower than it had been in October, the sun further south, the light hitting the lobby floor in a strip that would, when the terrazzo was cleaned and the original entrance ironwork was installed, be exactly as the 1897 drawings had indicated: a pool of afternoon light on the terrazzo at the base of the staircase, framing the entry sequence.
"Four weeks," she said. It came out before she had decided to say it. She meant: four weeks until the secondment ended. The sentence was about the scope. The sentence was also about other things.
He turned his head and looked at her.
She was looking at the lobby ceiling. She kept looking at it.
The afternoon light had moved since they had stood here at the start of the morning, lower now, the November sun further south, the strip of light through the entrance glass crossing the terrazzo at a different angle than it had at eight-thirty.
She had been here for six hours. In December the light would come in flatter still, at the angle the original drawings indicated for the shortest day.
She would not be here for the shortest day.
She had known this since September and she had not been thinking about it and now she was thinking about it specifically.
"The ironwork installation will run into the fourth week," she said. "I'll need a minimum of four weeks on-site to see the installation through properly."
"You'll have it," he said.
She looked at him.
He was looking at her with the expression that had been in her catalogue for eight weeks, the full, unhurried attention of a man who had decided something and was not in a hurry about it, who was going to let her arrive at her own decision in her own time, who had been waiting since the parlour and had not complained of waiting once.
The question was in the room. Both of them knew it.
She picked up her site bag.
"I'll have the staircase prep document to you tonight," she said.
"Good night, Iris," he said.
She looked at him for one beat. Then: "Good night," she said, and she went out through the entrance doors into the November afternoon.
She sat at her kitchen table that evening and did not write for a long time.
She had walked home through the November dusk, the city doing what the city did: moving around her, indifferent, continuous.
She had been walking these blocks for eight weeks and her feet knew them now in the way feet knew routes they had taken enough times that the route became a decision.
She did not think about which way to go.
She thought about a fourteen-foot ceiling that had been nine and a half feet this morning, and about a floor that had been carpet this morning, and about a man who had stood beside her in a lobby and looked at the terrazzo and said: I know.
The ceiling had come down and the building was itself and the terrazzo was restored and she had four weeks left on the secondment, and she sat with that.
She had been in New York for eight weeks.
She had arrived in October with her site kit and her rubber-soled boots and the specific intention of becoming someone she didn't already know, and she had not finished yet, was close to it, but not finished.
The question she had not asked was not, she understood now, about the project. It was not even about him, not exactly. It was the question she had been asking herself since she had packed three boxes in a London flat in March and handed back the keys and got on a plane: what do you actually want?
She thought about the question that had been in the room when she left, the question neither of them had asked, which was not, she understood, because neither of them knew the answer.
He knew his answer. She had been arriving at hers for eight weeks and she had been close for two and she was close now and the proximity of it was its own specific feeling: not readiness, exactly.
Recognition. The answer was already there.
She was simply still deciding whether to say it out loud.
She picked up her pen.
She wrote: I know the answer.
She looked at that. Then she wrote underneath it: I just haven't said it yet.
She closed her notebook and sat in her West Village flat in the November quiet and thought about a fourteen-foot lobby and what it meant for something to finally be what it always was.