THE GRATITUDE OF STRANGERS by Ihab Hassan
I
Sinclair Robertson was dying of throat cancer. The eminent Chicago architect once built with his heart ablaze. Now his face was cratered with age. Shrunken stature, angular head, a mane half lion and half cockatoo. But the intensity in his large, cobalt-blue eyes could still melt or freeze you to the bone. His great love was immortality. “Immortality?” I once asked him. He gave me his infamous glare and snapped: “The gratitude of strangers.” I thought, then, it’s just an oracular phrase. I have since learned – and who should know better? – that it was an expression of spiritual rage.
But what finally killed Sinclair Robertson, cancer or my howl? The question returns to me like a hissing boomerang.
* * *
I had known Sinclair intermittently for some twenty years. Stone was his business, stone, brick, steel, wood, and glass, anything an architect needs to make an idea habitable, to create a legend in space. Was it a human space? People stopped on the street, looked up shading their eyes, and shook their heads before walking away. Myself, I could never dismiss him with a shrug or head shake.
From my house in the Wisconsin woods, I can still see Sinclair in his aerie on the North Shore. He is wrapped in his scarlet dressing gown, gazing down at Lake Michigan, following the curvature of the earth with ravenous eyes. All the emblems and trophies of his career surround him, waiting for their place in the legend, waiting for the legend to take flight like the fabulous roc. I see him there, chest swollen, inhaling his own aura . . . has malice coated my tongue?
Everyone in Chicago knew that Sinclair, a foundling, fabulated in both words and stone. Everyone smirked about his golden rings, his rakish hats and billowing foulards. But the man had the blood of Titans; his amours could have been scripted by Ayn Rand. There were stygian sulks and transcendent tantrums, of course, and even whispers of incest. When his son, Craig, hung himself from a purlin in a country house, the gossip abated for a while. The cognoscenti began to whisper about a tragic flaw. Later, they said his vision had become fixed in amber and hubris gnawed his marrow. Few recognized that hubris turns cancerous, that amber bleeds.
They gossip, these cognoscenti – but can they howl?
II
I should have mentioned it earlier: my own throat, though cancer-free, now utters no sound, my tongue is still. The curse I once screamed has slipped off the edge of the earth, its echo dead. Sacks-full of silence fill the house, blowing about like sand. I do not see the sand. But sometimes, as I pace from room to room or stare at the swaying canopy of willow and spruce from the balcony, I suddenly recall that grisly scream. It was the night after Olivia – she of the Panic flute, the hoop earrings, and strange, lidded eyes – left me.
This dull void in heart and guts, it could happen to anyone: a lover discovering the note on his crumpled pillow, a prisoner on the dawn of his execution, a child orphaned by an airplane crash. But when I woke up that morning, throat parched, I felt a black hole suck at me from every pore. To save myself, I howled. For an interminable moment, the howl rose through the cedar roof of the house, swirled past the trees and vanished into the still sky, wailing like a dying train; Olivia’s favorite vase on the dresser cracked.
I felt then that I could no longer speak, not for an hour, not for a day, perhaps never again. The faceless clock by my bed ticked on. Phantasms began to tramp through the house: strangers drooling blood, Robertson clutching his throat in pain, Olivia herself, with taut skin and hooded eyes, giving me a side-long glance as she waved goodbye.
Believe it, I am a sober man. I do not hallucinate; I do not suffer from le grand mal. And though I may seem crotchety, I strive to strictly contain my self-pity. So when eidolons started stalking me around the house, I struck my brow – struck it three times, hard – as if to exorcise them with each blow. Mine was fancied extremity, I scolded myself; men and women have suffered worse than desertion. Wasn’t Sinclair’s cancer real? I could almost hear him groaning in his bed, with a small, rattling sound, as the morphine receded from his cells, his big hands reaching out in the dark.
And for what would his hands reach? Immortality? More probably some woman sitting at his bedside, his daughter, an unknown lover, or the mother he never had.
III
Why blame Olivia? I still don’t know why she left me.
We had met, she and I, at the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. I looked in the great bulbous mirror and saw a dazzle of white and gold – I thought angel wings had spread out behind my back. When I turned, I saw a blonde in a loose, white dress standing beside an older woman with silvery hair. For an instant, our eyes locked; then the two women drifted away, arm in arm, wrapped in casual mystery.
Later that week, we met again by accident – really by accident? – in the lobby of the Drake Hotel. As I sauntered over to the young woman, sitting at the edge of a purple, tufted sofa, knees pressed together, legs in a shapely diagonal, I thought: this is no apparition, this could be the love of my life. I barely noticed her nose then, a hint long and sharp, but remembered her alabaster skin, the golden hoops hanging from her ears, her disquieting, teal-green eyes.
Hello, I said. We met in a mirror.
She turned her head slowly and gave me a veiled smile.
May I sit for a moment? I believe that chance is an alias for fate.
I believe this is my mother now, looking for me across the lobby.
Her ordinary words sounded to me musical. (I didn’t know then that she could also play the flute.) As it happened, I was on my way to meet a client of Robertson Associates and wore my best pinstripe suit; as it also happened, both Olivia and her mother were architectural mavens. We chatted for a moment about the great Chicago builders, Burnham and Sullivan, Wright and Mies, Graham and Jahn – about Sinclair Robertson, they were terse – and contrasted the skylines of Chicago and New York. Before we parted, I offered to take mother and daughter on an architecture tour of the city:
Not one of those tourist things, I added quietly. Pleasant as those river tours can be.
* * *
Within a few months, Olivia had moved in with me at my flat on the South Side. (She did it insouciantly: a toothbrush one day, a robe another, a pair of house shoes, her favorite omelet pan.) But I had already begun to think of setting up my own practice in Racine, and of building a house in the Wisconsin woods, a small but original structure of steel cantilevers, projecting decks, wrap-around windows, and slender piles, straddling a pebbly rill. Olivia liked the idea – “I can already smell the dogwood and pine” – and approved the move despite her docent job at the Chicago Art Institute. Meanwhile, we avoided friends, hers and mine, and hoarded our hours. But she showed no interest in marriage. Let’s wait and see, she would say with a hieratic smile. Every Tuesday, she visited her mother in Highwood.
At the time, I never found reason to introduce Olivia to Sinclair Robertson. The old magus, I thought, would have already sensed the subtle transmutations in my life. It was an anxious friendship, anyway, harder to explain by the year.
IV
I need to go back, way back, if I am to achieve some sort of clarity, though I doubt clarity applies to howls or the gratitude of strangers.
It seems I had always wanted to pry into Sinclair Robertson’s existence, glimpse, through the haze of human mortality, the wellspring of his visions, the source of his charismatic energy. I was just a kid in Racine when he made his name, a kid dragging an oversize baseball bat in the dirt, with nails bitten to the quick. Later, I heard more about him when I went to the Chicago Institute of Design. Legends precede their facts.
Itchy in my youth and hot-eyed, I decided to apprentice myself at Robertson Associates even before Sinclair won the Pritzker Prize. He was generous in paradoxical ways: an egotist who liked to squander himself equally on enemies and friends. He hired me on the spot, gruffly but without ritual humiliations. Call it whimsy on his part, though I believe a Chicago bishop was nearer the mark when he quipped, in a gossip column, that Robertson suffered from an excess of love. And of unearthly greed, I would have added sotto voce, greed of eternity.
* * *
Once, passing through the serried rows of apprentices bent over their drafting boards, Sinclair caught the look of panic on my face. Breaking his long stride – six foot six and gangly in those days – he paused at my tilted table. For a full three minutes, he towered above my wooden stool, a wheezing warlock in the fluorescent light. Then, brushing aside my T‑square, he pointed a finger at the crux of my design. Twice, his immaculate fingernail tapped on the board before he moved away. No word was said. But within the hour, I had resolved the issue and discovered the harsh taste of success.
Sinclair never checked on me again. Projects kept appearing on my desk. Within two years, I had my own office – an abandoned closet – on the boss’s top floor. In earlier days, Sinclair had spoken to me no more than a few sentences in his growling, Harley-Davidson voice. But the day after I moved into my bright hole in the wall, he thrust his face through the door:
Come with me to the forum. “Architecture in America.” Tomorrow at the Palmer House.
I was flattered; I was elated; and when he rose above the lectern in the packed ballroom, I felt awe pluck at every nerve. He boomed:
It’s quite simple. Architecture in this city has had its moments but now mostly stinks.
He stared at his audience for a full minute before resuming in a lowered voice, a kind of Whisper out of the Whirlwind:
I’d have to call the prevalent mode today, the Excremental Style of Architecture.
Then he launched into a tirade – it was mayhem and magic – on timidity, conformity, commercialism, setting every tooth in the audience on edge, standing every cliché of the media on its head. When he finished, the silence in the ballroom roared louder than any applause.
Later, he beckoned me to attend him at the hotel bar. Slipping into a deep leather armchair, head thrown back, his long legs crossed, he began to work earnestly on a Macallan neat. Everyone envied me; everyone avoided us. He was on his second malt, looking happy and fierce, when he said:
They’ll say I’m way over the top. That my thinking is bent like a French curve. Let them. They need a swift kick in the crotch. And they will remember me.
That’s when we began to speak to one another in brutal banter; and though I concealed my deepest impulses – from him as from myself – a kind of sulfurous loyalty bound us to one another. Was my loyalty, I now wonder, born of envy, ambition, or solitude?
* * *
Sinclair Robertson may have become bent with time or may have been twisted from the start. Craig’s suicide some years later – I never met the boy – may have also settled like strontium in his aging bones. Then there was Fiona, his only daughter – it was said she sniffed assorted drugs, more in mischief than in need. But I had no sense of anything amiss beside his scandalous affairs. Only that one time, as I walked with Fiona after a ceremony honoring her father at City Hall, I whiffed the Furies.
Fiona was then barely out of her teens, a lithe girl with perfectly whorled ears, short, ginger hair, and gestures full of feral grace. Naturally, I wanted to speak to her about Sinclair, to praise him – I could do that sincerely – and also ingratiate myself. Sinclair and Hizzoner had preceded us out of the hall.
Does brilliance run in your family, like blue eyes? I asked her.
Actually, blue’s recessive.
But Sinclair’s brilliance is undeniable.
Oh, it’s been denied.
Her tone was unexpectedly crisp. I quoted Rilke on fame and she nodded without smiling. I decided that she considered me as her father’s flunky or fool, worthy only of disdain. In the vaulted foyer of the building – it had soaring Corinthian columns, endless acanthus friezes, even gardens on the roof – we came to a huge poster, hanging temporarily from a cross bar. It showed one of Sinclair’s weird projects: a sort of modern Babylon in the sky, prefiguring those monster fantasies of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Fiona looked at it out of the corner of her eye, tilting her head:
And how would it suit you to live in this grotesque pile? Say with your daughter and beloved wife, on the top floor. Live there happily ever after.
I was taken aback; I had neither daughter nor spouse. But I found myself thinking, involuntarily, of Myrrha and her incestuous story. For as long as it took me to recover my breath, the name of the Greek maiden fluttered in my mind like a wounded butterfly among myrrh trees.
V
Something happens to us as we age, something as unique as a retinal pattern or finger print. We think we can see the shape of things at last, our life laid bare. But all we see is our cracked selves, patched up with string and tape. That, at least, is what I felt after Olivia left, while I tried to parse the fragments of my own story.
A year after meeting Olivia, we moved to southern Wisconsin. I had left Robertson Associates and started my own firm in Racine, but kept in touch with the Chicago scene. Sinclair and I retained our affinities, notably an admiration for my home-state architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Sinclair would pen quirky notes with a metal quill and send them in cushy envelopes, quoting Wright: “Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it begins”; and I would reply, quoting Wright again: “Lighting may be made part of the building itself.” We corresponded largely in the words of the dead.
But my review in Architectural Forum had failed to rave about Sinclair’s last book, Light Without Symmetry, a glossy, over-sized affair, lavish with forced insights. More and more, his interviews in the press seemed less forthright than boorish; his photos showed, instead of the former grandee with bright foulards, a patriarch with rheumy eyes, glowering at an indifferent world. Even the rings on his bony fingers seemed to hang loose. So, where were all those sylphs who once draped themselves around his neck and trailed from his arm?
* * *
By contrast, the snapshots that Olivia and I took of each other during those years seemed to glow. We gazed at each other through the camera viewer as if happiness could be caught in a polished lens and arrested with a click. If pictures could remain unaltered in their album, why must we, its subjects, change? Why should paper and polyethylene endure more than flesh and bone?
One early autumn day, under a sky of heart-breaking blue, I took a photo of Olivia in a stand of black oak near our house. She was playing the flute, looking sideways at me as she blew into the mouthpiece, swaying prettily with the tune. Sumac bushes blazed somewhere behind her head. As I squeezed the button, I saw an uncouth form rear up, a shadow falling briefly across her face. Then it was gone. When I told Olivia, she laughed:
Oh, I always call Pan with my flute. That’s why I like to play in the woods.
When she said Pan, I peered into the trees again, scanning the oak branches, the sumac and the waving goldenrod. I saw nothing, only shadows hiding from the sun. But something in that rearing figure reminded me of a notorious portrait of Sinclair Robertson.
It had been painted by some obscure master of kitsch and hung in a gallery on Goethe Street. The large canvas showed the architect in his full nakedness, leaning back in a chair, arm hooked behind his head in the posture of the Barberini Faun. Ageing but still bulking body, enhanced genitals, white mane, knobby knees, deep creases on chest and face, and a scarlet robe, edged with ermine, carelessly draped over the chair. The eyes were large and oddly terrified. The figure seemed to recede from the canvas, shrinking from a specter behind the viewer. The colors of the portrait, despite the robe’s scarlet swirl, were livid.
I had walked out of the gallery that day, troubled and repelled, yet marveling at the inadvertent acuity of kitsch. Now I thought of Pan in his shaggy age, dragging his cleft hoofs in a fen, sniffing the air for nymphs in a Wisconsin grove. I felt troubled again.
VI
The year after I wrote my reluctant review of Sinclair’s book, the International Society of Architects met in Chicago. I thought that might be the occasion to see Sinclair one more time before he could dissolve into a legend. (Cheer Up, Soon I’ll Vanish into Words, he had scrawled in lieu of the usual complimentary in a recent letter.) But Olivia seemed listless, stopping in mid-sentence and picking up her flute. Finally, she decided against the trip to the Windy City:
You go. I want to visit Mother in Highwood, anyway. Haven’t done so in weeks. But I’ll be back home before you.
Sensing my disappointment, Olivia wiggled her fingers friskily in the air:
Oh, yes, and I want to summon Pan again. I’ve been neglecting my flute.
I strained in vain to hear a false note in her laugh. We are happy, I told myself, laughing back.
* * *
Sinclair left me a voice message at the Chicago Four Seasons: “Dinner at eight? Spiaggia next door? It’s noisy but what the hell, we don’t have that much to say to one another.” I smiled when I heard his old throaty voice.
He was waiting for me at the bar, fondling a large tumbler of Macallan. On that night, the restaurant blinged. We sat at a floor-to‑ceiling window table overlooking the Oak Street Beach and I said:
This restaurant has attitude.
Sinclair gulped from his tumbler – he wouldn’t let the waiter carry it over from the bar:
Don’t be impressed by money. I told you, it’s immortality that counts.
He did all the talking that evening and all of it was about his Legacy. Ruefully, he concluded:
I don’t have much time. Everything I do is now under suspicion.
Then he glared at Lake Michigan under the night sky but the Cockatrice had fled from his gaze:
Young man, what are you going to do about it?
I was no longer young and I nudged the conversation toward his family. He brushed that aside:
Look, Craig died. Perhaps I killed him. There’s also Fiona, from my second marriage – you met her. She’s scarred but loyal. The wives weren’t really any good.
And all those other women?
He chuckled, knowing I would catch his allusion:
“The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”
Then he pushed away his coffee. The veins in his hands were swollen.
There must be something you could write. Language, you know, survives steel and stone. Slogans outlast epitaphs.
We looked at each other through an invisible screen. I thought: why all this ponderous japery? But Sinclair’s face had suddenly collapsed like a façade struck by a demolition ball. I realized then that Sinclair Robertson needed no friends. He needed no gratitude, either, only some rubric – like Rabelaisian or Kafkaesque – irrevocably conjunct with his name. I watched his fingers fritter the roll on his bread plate.
The evening ended abruptly, without Sinclair asking after Olivia or my work in Racine. There was finality in his farewell, a distant letting-go. He waved – negligently, poignantly – over his shoulder without looking at me.
* * *
When I closed the door of my hotel room later that night, the walls suddenly began to weave and sweat broke from every pore – I could not find my breath. It was a rush of sheer panic such as I had never experienced before. When I recovered, heart still pounding, I picked up the phone. Against my better judgment – for it was unconscionably late – I called home. She’d be back by now, I told myself, and she’d eventually pick up the phone. Olivia’s sleepy voice finally mumbled “hello.” Those two syllables drained my dread away:
Oh, dear, I woke you. I’ll make it short. I’ll be home tomorrow.
Wonderf’l, da’ling. Howas’t?
I think Sinclair’s dying, I blurted.
Her silence, instinct with the night, seemed to last forever. At last, she whispered as if still in a dream:
I knew him a long time ago.
Knew him? My tongue turned to stone.
I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Good night, dear.
I was still holding the receiver when the operator’s voice started to drone: “If you want to make a call. . . .”
VII
What can I possibly say about the ensuing months? Olivia had met Sinclair Robertson long ago and that’s all she would tell me before picking up her flute or riffling through a magazine. During one of my inquisitions, she inspected carefully her flute, lip-hole, keys, and tenons, before replacing it on the coffee table, and looking straight at me, asked:
What color are my eyes?
Green, I found myself saying in a trance.
Green like jealousy?
She stood up and left the living room slowly, lovely in her disdain.
* * *
Since that day – since she walked out of the room clad in impervious beauty – the air in the house became very still. Oh, we argued wordlessly and Olivia continued to play the flute. But one evening, after some trivial interchange – these mute arguments could be about anything, the flavor of polenta or a drip in the atrium roof – I tried to change the subject:
Come, play something on the flute for me, Olivia.
Not tonight, dear. Pan has a headache.
We slept in different rooms. I began to loathe Sinclair Robertson, loathe him beyond jealousy or spite, while admiring him still. Did I ever love the man? As for Olivia, she moved coolly about the house, her sharp nose angled toward the ceiling, performing obscure, apotropaic gestures.
* * *
I did not kill Sinclair Robertson – but I smeared him in print. In article after article, I pretended to laud the Sinclairesque Style while tarring his achievement. I spoke of grandeur, implying bombast; of asymmetry, hinting lazy conception; of vibrancy that spilled into gratuitous violence at every ornamental turn. I invoked the sheer amplitude of Sinclair’s vision but also evoked the emptiness of boundless plains. More, I hinted the imminent release of a posthumous manifesto, left in illegible fragments – meaning his letters to me – that I labored to edit through the night. Nothing I wrote was arrantly false, nothing wholly true. But with every word – or so I thought – I hammered a silver nail into the coffin of Sinclair’s immortality.
* * *
A few days after Fiona called to say that her father had died of cancer, Olivia left. I was out gathering blueberries in the woods. Her note on the pillow simply read: “See you in the mirror sometime.” I put down my head and slept, dreaming of viscous organs held in bloody hands. When I woke up, I howled. It wasn’t a curse, I realize at last: I was trying to eject myself, empty myself out. Now I pass my days clutching my throat or waiting in penance before the Cloud Gate. At night, I listen to the silence of the stars.
Ihab Hassan is the author of fifteen nonfiction books, most recently In Quest of Nothing: Essays 1998–2008 (AMS Press Inc, 2010). His short stories have appeared in AGNI and Antioch Review.