Chapter 18
Igo back on Saturday.
Not because he asks. He has not asked. He has not called since I left his apartment three days ago with the terms between us and the withdrawal in Darcy’s filing cabinet and the folding chair in the living room where I told him to keep it.
The silence between us this time is different from every silence before — not enforced, not legal, not the breathing room of cautious distance.
This silence is deliberate. He is giving me space because I told him to participate in our life and the first act of participation is letting me decide when the participation starts.
Sable arrived Thursday night. She is staying at my apartment, sleeping on the left side of the bed the way she has always slept, her boots by the door and her laptop on the kitchen counter and her professional skepticism radiating from every surface.
She has not said I told you so. She has not said I’m worried.
She has said: “I’m here. Show me what you’re building. ”
I showed her the power plant Friday morning.
She stood in the turbine hall and she looked up at the arched windows and the crane rail and the sixty-foot ceiling and she said, “This is extraordinary,” and then she looked at the repaired weld on the third truss and she said, “Torres did good work,” because Sable looks at welds the way she looks at everything — with the precision of a person who understands that connections are where structures succeed or fail.
Now it is Saturday. I am sitting at my kitchen counter in Oak Cliff with my coffee and my phone and the knowledge that I am about to drive to East Dallas and knock on the door of a man I was married to for six years and divorced from for five months and who I chose three days ago with my body before my mouth could form the words.
“Are you going?” Sable says from the couch. She is reading something on her laptop. She does not look up.
“I’m going.”
“Want me to come?”
“No.”
She looks up. Her look says: I am your engineer and I test the welds you cannot test yourself and I am willing to sit in the car outside his apartment building like a protective detail in a Subaru with a loud muffler.
“I need to do this alone,” I say.
“I know.” She goes back to her laptop. “Take your time. I’ll be here.”
I drive to East Dallas. The route is already becoming familiar — north from Oak Cliff, across the bridge, east through downtown and into the neighborhoods that exist between the Crenshaw world and mine.
Small houses. Auto repair shops. Taco trucks.
The quiet, unpolished Dallas that neither of us grew up in and both of us are choosing now.
I park in the lot. I look up at the building.
Second floor, the window on the left — the one that faces the parking lot and the Dollar General.
The curtain is open. I can see the ceiling inside.
Just the ceiling. White, unremarkable, belonging to a building that does not know what is about to happen inside it.
I go up the stairs. I knock.
He opens the door. He is wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, untucked, and his feet are still bare because apparently Weston Crenshaw has decided that shoes in his own apartment are part of the machine he is dismantling, and the bare feet on the hardwood are a kind of commitment to the stripped-down thing he is becoming.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Come in.”
The apartment has changed. Not dramatically — the folding chair is still there, the mattress is still on the floor in the bedroom, the coffee maker is still the only appliance on the kitchen counter.
But there are books now. Not just the stack by the chair.
A row of them on the kitchen counter — novels, from what I can see, paperback novels with broken spines and dog-eared pages.
The kind of books you buy at a secondhand store because you need something to read on the bus.
And on the windowsill — the one that faces the Dollar General — there is a small cactus in a clay pot. A single green thing in an apartment that has been deliberately emptied of everything decorative and personal and comforting. He has allowed himself one living thing.
“Is that new?” I say, pointing at the cactus.
“Last week. The woman at the garden store said they’re impossible to kill.”
“She’s wrong. You can kill a cactus by overwatering it.”
“Then I will underwater it.”
“That’s not how it works either.”
“How does it work?”
“You pay attention to it. Not too much. Not too little. You learn what it needs and you provide it and you don’t try to compensate for neglect with excess.”
He looks at me. I look at him. The cactus sits on the windowsill between us and we both understand that we are not talking about the cactus, and the not-talking-about-the-cactus is the first moment since the island that has felt like us.
Like the people we were before the machine took over.
Like the man who said: “I want to marry a woman who will tell Boyd Crenshaw he’s wrong about load-bearing walls. ”
“Tell me something,” I say.
“Anything.”
“Tell me something that is not about the hurricane. Not about the divorce. Not about the compound or the machine or the eight hours. Tell me something ordinary.”
He thinks. The thinking takes longer than it should, which is its own kind of answer — how long has it been since anyone asked Weston Crenshaw for something ordinary?
“I’ve been reading,” he says. “On the bus. I started with nonfiction — therapy books, self-help, the things Dr. Okafor recommended. And then I picked up a novel at a used bookstore on Greenville and I couldn’t put it down. I read three novels in two weeks. I haven’t read a novel since college.”
“What were they about?”
“People. Just people. Living their lives, making mistakes, figuring things out. No billionaires. No dynasties. No property development. Just people on buses and in apartments and at jobs they don’t love and in marriages they’re trying to save.
” He almost smiles. “The bus is good for reading. Nobody talks to you on the bus.”
“Nobody talks to you anywhere. You’re a Crenshaw.”
“That’s not true. People talk to me at the coffee shop. The barista at the place on Greenville knows my name. She calls me Wes. Nobody has called me Wes since high school.”
I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it — a short, surprised laugh that has no bitterness in it.
Just amusement. The sound of a woman hearing something genuinely funny from a man she thought had forgotten how to be funny, and the funniness is in the detail: a barista named him Wes and he let her, and the letting-her is its own kind of revolution.
He laughs too. His laugh is rusty and uncertain, the laugh of a man who has not used it in months, who has been so focused on the gravity of what he did that he forgot that gravity is not the only force.
Levity is a force too. Connection is a force.
The shared recognition that two people standing in an apartment with a cactus and a folding chair are, despite everything, still capable of making each other laugh.
“Tell me about the power plant,” he says.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. I want to know everything. I was in it for fifteen minutes and I could feel it — the building, the bones, the intention. I want to know what you see when you stand in the turbine hall.”
So I tell him. I sit in the folding chair — the only chair in the apartment — and he sits on the floor with his back against the wall and his bare feet on the hardwood and I tell him about the power plant.
About R.L. Hayworth, who designed the building in 1943 and whose initials are still stamped into the steel.
About the turbine hall’s sixty-foot ceiling and the crane rail that bisects it like a spine.
About the arched windows that were designed to let in light for the workers who spent twelve-hour shifts feeding the boilers.
About the weld on the third truss and Torres’s clean repair and Greta’s reverence for the steel.
About Miriam Osei and the case study. About the Fort Worth warehouse.
About Keely and the Hendricks project and the firm at capacity through August.
He listens. He does not interrupt. He does not check his phone.
He does not translate what I am saying into a task or a problem or a thing to be managed.
He listens the way a person listens when they are hearing something they have never heard before and understanding that the not-hearing was a kind of violence and the hearing is a kind of repair.
“You built this in four months,” he says.
“I built the firm in ten years. I built the power plant commission in two. I built the vision in a lifetime.”
“I didn’t see any of it.”
“No.”
“I’m seeing it now.”
“I know.”
The afternoon light moves through the apartment.
The Dollar General sign across the parking lot catches the sun and throws a faint glow through the window that lands on the floor between us, between his bare feet and my boots, a strip of borrowed light in a room that has no light of its own except what comes through the glass.
“I want to show you something,” he says. He gets up and goes to the stack of books by the chair and pulls one from the bottom — not a novel, a sketchbook. A plain black Moleskine with a rubber band around it. He opens it and hands it to me.
The pages are covered in writing. Not the writing I know from him — not the boardroom memos, not the emails, not the crisp, efficient language of a CEO communicating objectives.
This writing is uneven, sometimes cramped, sometimes sprawling, the handwriting of a man who is thinking faster than his hand can move.
It is a journal. Entries dated from September through February.
Five months of a man sitting in a folding chair writing about what he did and what it cost and who he was and who he is trying to become.