Epilogue #2
"Is this Gemma Burke?" A voice she did not recognise, professional and direct. "I am calling from the Chicago Architecture Foundation. We have been following the Meridian project and we would like to discuss a commission. An interior documentation project for the Foundation's archive."
She looked at Tristan across the kitchen. He raised an eyebrow. She held up one finger: one moment.
"I am available," she said, "to have that conversation. Can I call you back on Monday? I have a garlic situation developing."
The person on the phone said yes, of course, Monday, and gave her a number, and she wrote it on the back of her hand the way she always did when she did not have a notebook, and hung up.
"The Foundation," Tristan said.
"The Foundation." She looked at the number on her hand. "It is a documentation project. For the archive."
"That is significant."
"I know." She looked at him. "It is also Monday's problem."
He looked at her for a moment. Then: "Good."
She went to get the notebook from her bag, because the number on her hand was going to smear before Monday and she was not a person who left important information to chance.
She wrote it down. She put the notebook back.
She came back to the kitchen and stood at the counter with her wine and watched Tristan cook in the Friday evening light that came through the windows low and warm and specifically August, the way August light did when it had somewhere particular to be.
She thought about September. About a conference room on an upper floor of a building she had not known she was walking into the life of.
About a floor plan she had built from three weeks of research and four years of experience and a set of choices she had made because they were right for the space and for no other reason.
About a man at the back of the room who had read her portfolio for eleven minutes and had come to see if she was real.
She was real. She had always been real. The building had always known it.
The work had always known it. And now there was a person across a kitchen who knew it too, completely and specifically and without conditions, and there was a lake outside the window and a number in a notebook and a garlic situation developing, and she was not planning the exit route, and the Friday evening was carrying them forward, and Gemma Burke, formerly Gemma Sinclair, principal designer, let it.
Dinner was good. It was always good on Fridays, because Tristan cooked on Fridays with the specific attention he gave to things he had decided mattered, which was how she had come to understand that the cooking was not a practical division of labour but a choice he made weekly and without announcement, the way he left the kitchen light on and set out the second mug, the habit of care made so ordinary it had stopped requiring notice.
She washed the dishes. He dried them. They had done this every night for eight months and it had not become boring, which she noted as relevant information about both the habit and the person she was doing it with.
"The Foundation call," he said, drying a glass with the particular care he brought to things that were breakable. "Is that something you want?"
She thought about it. "I want to know what it is before I want it," she said. "I do not take commissions I have not read the brief for."
"I know. I am asking whether you are interested in principle."
She considered. "Documentation work is different from renovation work.
It requires me to understand a building without changing it, which is a different skill.
" She stacked a plate. "I think I would be good at it.
I also think it would be useful for the archive piece to have a companion project, something that continues the conversation about visual history rather than closing it. "
"That sounds like yes in principle."
"It is yes in principle pending the brief." She looked at him. "You knew that."
"I did. I wanted to hear you say it." He put the glass away. "Toby is going to want to review any Foundation contract."
"Toby always wants to review every contract. Tell him I will send it when I have it."
"He will say that is not how document review works."
"Tell him that is how it works with me and he has had eight months to adjust."
Tristan smiled. She filed it in the column she had stopped keeping formally because the column had become simply the way she saw him, accumulated and specific and entirely hers.
Cleo came for Sunday brunch the following weekend, which had become a rhythm sometime in the spring, the two of them at the kitchen table with the good coffee Tristan made and the pastries Cleo brought from the place on Michigan and the conversation that moved between the studio and the city and everything else with the ease of people who had known each other long enough to skip the parts that did not need saying.
Tristan read the newspaper at the other end of the table, which was his version of giving them space while remaining in the room, and which Cleo had noted, in February, was the correct instinct for a person in his position and evidence of good judgment.
"The Foundation call," Cleo said, pulling apart a cardamom roll. "Are we doing it?"
"I am reading the brief on Monday."
"We are doing it." Cleo looked at the window, at the August lake. "Do you know what I was thinking about this week?"
"Tell me."
"September. The pitch. I was in the studio when you came back and you sat in the chair for four minutes and then you described the whole thing, the floor plan and the budget and the panel and the man at the back of the room who handed you a coffee without asking.
" She looked at Gemma. "You left out the part where you were already in trouble. "
"I was not in trouble."
"You were absolutely in trouble. You described the way he handed you the coffee in detail and then said there was nothing to say yet." Cleo took a bite of the roll. "I filed that under: something to revisit."
"You file everything under something to revisit."
"It is why I am so well-informed." Cleo looked across the table at Tristan, who had turned a page of the newspaper and was reading with the composure of someone who was not listening at all and was doing so with great skill. "Tristan."
He looked up.
"I would like you to know," Cleo said, "that I told her in October that the best surprises usually start as plans, and I have been correct about that consistently, and I consider this one of my finer moments."
"I am aware," Tristan said. "Gemma told me."
"Good." Cleo picked up her coffee. "I also want you to know that if you ever do anything that requires me to drive to this apartment at a difficult hour, I will find it very inconvenient."
"Noted."
"I mean it as a compliment," Cleo said. "I do not want to have to come. That is the compliment."
He looked at her for a moment. "I understand."
"Good." Cleo turned back to Gemma. "The Meridian client is going to call about burnt orange."
"I know. I am ready."
"Are you going to let him have it?"
"I am going to let him suggest it, explain clearly why it does not work, and watch him agree." She looked at the lake. "He always agrees. He just needs the route to be his."
"He is going to be unbearable at the opening."
"He is going to be at the opening in a building that is extraordinary and he is going to tell everyone it was his vision, and we are going to smile and let him, because the work is in the building and the building is going to be there long after the opening party, and that is the part that matters. "
Cleo looked at her. The particular look, the one that had been there since they were twenty-four and building the studio from two desks in a shared workspace. The look that said: I see you. All of it.
"You are different," Cleo said.
"I know."
"Good different."
"I know that too."
Cleo picked up her coffee. She looked at Tristan. She looked at Gemma. She looked at the apartment with the prints on the wall and the lake outside and the kitchen table with three people at it on a Sunday morning in August, doing what kitchens were for.
"All right," she said. "Tell me about the Foundation brief."
So Gemma told her. And the Sunday moved forward, warm and specific, and the city was outside, and the lake was there, and the work was ahead of them, and the life was around them, and Gemma Burke, formerly Gemma Sinclair, let all of it be exactly what it was.
She picked up her glass. She looked at the lake.
The city was outside, doing what it always did: being entirely and specifically itself.
So was she.
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