Two Time

TWENTY-ONE

MONTAUK HIGHWAY, the east-west artery of the South Fork, established an economic Maginot Line as it ran through Southampton. To the south you had to add a decimal point or two to the price of a house, but it also marked a horticultural divide between a hundred years of decorative landscaping and open farm country, now interrupted by strips of new construction featuring halfhearted nods to late-twentieth-century architectural detail appliquéd over standard suburban boxes, and an occasional old farmhouse accompanied by a cluster of outbuildings of the same vintage, tucked inside a grove of sugar maples or white oaks once planted by an actual farmer. When I was growing up one of these places had evolved into an auto repair and body shop specializing in foreign sports cars when the farmer’s kids, Rudy and Johnny Fournier, returned from World War II thoroughly seduced by the exotica of Alfa Romeos, bathtub Porsches and T-series MGs. It was called Contemporary Car Care. I liked to hang around there and watch the mechanics, some of whom were French and Italian imports themselves, deconstruct peculiar little engines and transmissions and restore lithe lowrider auto bodies to their original insouciance. Eventually they started to ask me to hold a wrench or change a tire, which led to simple repair tasks, which evolved into summer and weekend jobs managing progressively more sophisticated undertakings. It was good training for an engineering career, in some ways better than what they taught me at MIT, where the puzzles were more logical and failure had less immediate consequence.

The mechanical design of those postwar European cars was idiosyncratic at best. Parts were hard to come by, or completely unavailable. What manuals we had were usually in the car’s native language, like British English, which stubbornly renamed every automotive component and included tips on driving like “when coming upon an unexpected incline, briskly engage the braking mechanism.” It made working on their American counterparts, with their cavernous engine compartments and adjustment tolerances as wide as the Great Plains, seem entirely sensible and effortless.

So when Amanda gave me the directions to Butch’s place, I knew exactly where it was. The big painted sign with three nesting Cs had disappeared years ago. When you live in the place where you grew up you get used to the continual destruction of familiar reference points. After the sign was gone and the jumble of sports cars in various states of disassembly and repair had vanished from around the only outbuilding visible from the road, I’d never bothered to see what had taken its place. It turned out to be Butch’s Institute of the Consolidated Industrial Divine.

We pulled in the driveway and rounded the first big curve into the main area. The tall trees on the property had grown considerably, crowding the house in a leafy embrace. The house itself was almost unrecognizable. The screened-in front porch was furnished in mismatched overstuffed chairs and couches, bicycles, a refrigerator, an old streamlined gas pump that used to sit over by the repair bays, a pair of armless mannequins standing front to back, and a jumble of coffee cups, oriental vases, carved wooden statues of Dali’s camel-legged elephants, hookahs, a TV set and a big scale model of a three-masted schooner. On the wall hung a large abstract painting in predominantly reds and oranges, which contrasted alarmingly with the flaky putty-gray color of the cedar siding—the result of some distant ill-advised paint job. I vaguely remembered a neat lawn, which was now full of rocks, weedy broad-leafed plants and feral perennials. Though long gone to neglect, you could discern an underlying order, suggesting the tangled remains of a Japanese garden.

I turned off the engine and was about to get out when the door of the house and the garage doors of the closest outbuilding were flung open and people in bright red jumpsuits, black ski masks and goggles poured out. They quickly surrounded the car and opened both doors, motioning with a flourish for us to step out. Amanda was saying things like, “well, hello,” but I was too busy keeping an eye on everybody. They all carried some sort of tool, and two of the bigger ones were rolling a big hydraulic jack out of the garage. No one spoke, but their gestures were exaggerated, theatrical, like mimes. One motioned for us to step back from the car while the others circled it, using a lot of extra steps and movements, nodding at each other and shrugging and waving their tools in the air. The pair with the jack rolled it under the car and one dropped to the ground to set the lifting pad under a sturdy part of the chassis. At least I hoped that’s what he, or she, was doing.

I made a move toward the car to make sure but Amanda gently gripped my forearm, so I stopped. Seconds later one side of the Grand Prix was up off the ground. Everyone applauded, a muffled sound since they were all wearing red leather gloves. Then one of them blew on a bosun’s whistle, which prompted three of the red jumpsuits to run back into the garage, out of which came two more people, one in a white jumpsuit and red ski mask, the other in a tuxedo wearing a rubber mask that made him look a lot like Woody Woodpecker. He was carrying an old cast iron music stand, which he set up about ten feet from the front of the car and began to conduct the affair with a baton that he pulled from inside of his tuxedo.

Meanwhile, the white jumpsuit pulled out a chrome impact wrench and snapped it to the end of a blue hose that had been hidden in the long grass. Then before I fully grasped what was happening, he used the wrench to take off the two raised tires. The garage door rolled open again and the three red jumpsuits dragged out a wheel balancer. I knew that because I used to balance wheels on it when I worked for Contemporary Car Care. It came from Italy and accommodated standard hubs as well as wire wheels, which you had to tune and true-up as well as balance. A heavy machine, they’d somehow managed to get it up on an industrial grade dolly so they could roll it over the gravel drive to within a few feet of my car. Two other red jumpsuits brought over my tires and hoisted them one at a time onto the machine for balancing. I tried to remember the last time they’d been balanced, and couldn’t, since I’d only driven the car on the highway once in the last five years, lessening the need.

Somewhere over my head in the trees somebody started playing a French horn. That brought my attention back to the Grand Prix, where another team was changing my oil, with one guy on a creeper under the car emptying the oil pan, the other ready to fill from above. I wondered how trustworthy the old jack was, especially given the weight of the Grand Prix, hoisted up on two wheels. I fought the urge to go find a pair of jack stands, though it wasn’t long before they had all the tires balanced and all four wheels back on the ground. At this point, a pair of garden hoses appeared and the whole crew worked on washing the car, caring little about keeping the jumpsuits dry. In fact, on the final rinse, the holder of the hose turned it on the rest and the whole event degenerated (or advanced, hard to tell) into a kids’ water fight, with a lot of yelling and laughter, which caused me to realize that until now it had been an entirely soundless production, except for the French horn, now silent.

One of first rifts I can remember forming between me and my daughter was after a trip to the City to go to museums, at her urging, since at about sixteen she was already considering going to art school. Allison’s education and enrichment was normally Abby’s task, but there was something about big museums that repelled my wife. Probably because they were filled with art and people who understood what it might all mean, raising the danger someone would ask her opinion on the subject. She had none, since she’d made no attempt to learn anything about Western civilization, except to feel that museums might be useful to her daughter. So under the pretext of improving our father-daughter relationship, already starting to fray Abby volunteered me for the duty.

Abby thought being an engineer made me biologically incapable of knowing anything about art beyond spelling the word. Allison, building on that assumption, and flush with self-importance having had a high school art appreciation course, spent the day instructing me and expressing pity over my sad lack of comprehension. Nevertheless, I did my best to support her critical judgment as we moved from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and into the Romantic Period, agreeing that Leonardo was awesome and that El Greco gave us the creeps. Trouble came when we were standing before some huge piece of canvas apparently ruined by somebody who’d knocked over a can of paint. She said she loved it. I said I didn’t get it. She sighed with exasperation.

“You just don’t know how to like it,” she said.

“No, I’m saying I don’t get it.”

“That’s your way of saying you don’t like it. You’re saying you don’t want to understand it.”

In retrospect, I should have said something like, “You’re right, honey, why don’t you help me understand.” Instead I let her hypothesis of my motives take root, later to combine with other grim hostilities and sad misconceptions, until it all grew into a profound alienation.

I did take the central criticism to heart, and put some effort into learning about contemporary art, and even started to like some things I’d earlier pass by. I learned to approach every artistic expression with an open mind. Tabula rasa. To withhold reflex judgments, and allow the underlying intentions of the artist to reveal themselves over time. Most of all, to be caring and sensitive.

“So what the fuck was that all about?” I asked Amanda, after they finally turned off the hoses, applauded each other, turned to us and did a deep bow, before walking back into one of the outbuildings, stripping off the soaked jumpsuits as they went.

“It’s just Butch. Performance art is his first love.”

“I’m glad he’s not a deconstructionist.”

“You took it well.”

“I only wish he’d looked at the differential while the car was off the ground. I think it’s leaking.”

She took my arm and led me toward the house.

“It’s how he got started as an artist, according to Dione. Doing theater, writing one-act plays. But the formalities of all that became too restraining. So he started his own thing.”

“Looks like a team sport. Must like a lot of people around him.”

“They do everything together. Some have been with Butch a long time. Two or three all the way back to Boston. Like Charles and Edgar.”

“Really.”

“That’s where he started. He ran a framing shop in a loft in the North End for one of the galleries to help pay for his theater work. Turned it into a full-out artists’ commune until the gallery found out and fired him. So he came down here when you could still find cheap places to crash. The rest is history, art history if you believe Butch. You should let him tell the story, though. It’s hilarious.”

On the way to the house I stopped to hold the bottom of a ladder stuck up into one of the maple trees for a teenage girl who was descending with a French horn under her arm.

“Hi, Evelyn,” said Amanda, putting out her hand to shake. “Lovely music. Added an essential ingredient to the experience. Evelyn is Butch and Dione’s daughter. Meet Sam Acquillo.”

“Owner of the car. Equally essential.”

She took my hand. She was tall and slim, like her father, with her mother’s broad face and freckles. She wore a pair of freshly ironed khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt, her light brown hair tied back in a ponytail.

“I’m sorry about all this,” she said to Amanda, brushing some bark debris off her shorts. “You know how my father is when he gets an enthusiasm.”

“It was fun,” said Amanda.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be back for my five-thousand-mile checkup.”

She walked with us toward the house.

“He loves to use all the stuff left over from when this was a repair shop. I don’t know where the red suits came from. I don’t know much about any of this stuff. The French horn was Mommy’s idea. My father had to put me in the tree. So stupid.”

When we got to the house we followed Evelyn through the screened-in porch past the mannequins and into what I remembered was a mudroom, now lined with shelves crammed with model trains and cars, china figurines from several different eras, Pez dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, Christmas ornaments—miniature Santas riding sleighs, skiing or offering bottles of Coke, some lit from within, others gyrating in a mechanized flat-footed dance—chrome cocktail decanters, martini glasses and an unnerving assortment of voodoo dolls, or so I surmised from the pins and grimacing faces. I rushed Amanda through to the kitchen, where Dione was leaning over a huge butcherblock center island aggressively massaging a large wad of yellowy dough. She wore a scooped neck T-shirt that exposed a string of glass beads, more like marbles, half submerged in the folds of her neck. Her hair, barely under control at the fundraiser, was now in full revolt, springing from her head at random angles, or tucked hastily into dark tortoise-shell barrettes. Sweat gleamed on her forehead and upper lip, and both cheeks glowed red, not unlike the creepy illuminated Santas.

The kitchen itself was no less claustrophobically decorated than the passageway, though the theme here was more agrarian. I had to duck to get underneath bundles of fragrant grasses twisted into manageable shapes and hung from hooks in the ceiling. The walls were also lined with open shelves that held enough copper pots, fry pans, cauldrons, double boilers, casserole dishes, woks and fondue sets to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for most of Long Island. More striking were the glass jars, the kind you seal with glass tops and wire clasps. There might have been hundreds, each filled with a different material, granular or liquid, each a different color.

“Hey, Sweetie. You did great,” she said to Evelyn, who walked by without comment and disappeared through a door at the other end of the room. Dione smiled at us as if there’d just been a pleasant exchange, and dug her hands into the dough.

“Most people need love, I knead bread. That’s K, N, E, A, D.’ It’s a joke,” said Dione, through short puffs of exertion as she squeezed and beat the dough, occasionally lifting it off the table and slapping it back down again.

“You bake?” she asked Amanda.

“I hardly cook,” she answered.

“Great exercise—for the forearms and the olfactories,” she said, calling my attention to the symphony of smells that swirled around the room. Not all pleasant, including the one coming off Dione herself. But I could also pick out spices, like curry and nutmeg, cinnamon, maybe, and coffee. There must have been a loaf or two of bread in the oven, with its unmistakable aroma. My ability in the kitchen trailed Amanda’s by a considerable distance, so I’m sure there were things wafting around the air that would have impressed a more cultivated nose. To me it was more like an assault my olfactories were struggling to withstand.

“So, your red jumpsuit must be at the cleaners,” I said to Dione.

She smiled broadly.

“What a kick, huh? They only just worked it out today. You can blame Amanda.”

Amanda put her hands out like somebody was about to swing a stick at her. She looked at me like I had the stick.

“Oh no, I had nothing to do with that.”

“When Butch called you about the Council Rock you told him about Sam’s big old car. That gave him the idea.”

“Come over to Oak Point and we’ll return the favor,” I said. “Just give me time to install the lift. Don’t have as big a crew.”

“No, no, you can’t repeat the same performance. It has to be distinctively right for the moment,” said Dione as she left the center island and walked over to a large cabinet that held a stack of stereo components.

“Bach, Mingus or Green Day? What’s your mood?”

“Smirnoff,” I said.

Amanda frowned at me.

“Bach would be lovely,” she said.

“I was getting to the drink requests. Though I thought you were an Absolut man.”

“I used to be, but now I’m rethinking the gray areas.”

The music blasted out from all corners of the room, causing both of us to jump a little. Dione apologized and turned it down.

“Sorry, I was trying to listen to NPR over the French horn. Need company when I’m baking bread.”

When she moved away from the center island I could see she was barefoot and wore a pair of blue-jean cutoffs that struggled to contain the vaguely contoured mass of her thighs and butt. Also that she was braless, though containing those mighty globes probably wouldn’t have done much to improve the situation. I doubted any undergarment could have restrained her nipples, which stuck out from her T-shirt like a pair of artillery rounds.

“And for the lady, Pinot Noir is what I remember,” she said, swinging open the doors of another tall cabinet, this one stocked floor to ceiling with bottles and cans—food, wine, liquor, household cleaners, olive oil, motor oil, anything that came in a cylindrical container.

“That’d be lovely,” said Amanda.

“I’m not sure about the Pinot part, but the Noir seems to suit you,” said Dione, pulling the cork like a veteran sommelier.

“Noir means black, even I know that,” said Amanda. “Should I be flattered?”

“No, merely impressed,” said Dione, while I stood there feeling again like I was watching a Kabuki play without a libretto, or whatever you call the thing that tells you what the hell is going on. I had about thirty years in heavy industry, ten of which I ran a technology operation in support of a huge global corporation that made billions refining fundamental resources like air, iron and crude oil. I got to see a lot of things, and work my way around a lot of people, many of whom spoke a different language, prayed in mosques or performed their trades under the threat of secret police. A lot of times things were a little strange and confusing, but at least we shared a frame of reference. We were all basically trying to do the same thing, which was to squeeze the greatest return on investment out of every molecule of matter God chose to make accessible to human manipulation. It was all ostensibly about science and engineering, though I guess you could say there was considerable art in the pursuit. I was beginning to feel, however, that none of it could prepare me for artists.

On cue, Butch and his merry men burst into the kitchen, all naked, drying themselves off and joking around, shoving and snapping towels at each other’s butt. They were followed by two women, young and furtive, their towels cinched up tight around their chests. Dione opened the refrigerator and dispensed Gatorade and soda as they moved through the kitchen and out another door, I assumed heading upstairs to dress, though I wouldn’t have bet on anything at that point. Throughout the parade Amanda leaned unflinching against a stack of shelves, sipping her wine.

“Well,” she said, after the last guy cleared the room. “I supposed that was the long and the short of it.”

Dione toasted her with her wineglass and I went over to the tall cabinet to see if I could find something clear and astringent you could pour over ice cubes. Dione apologized again and dug out a liter bottle of some fruity flavored version of Absolut. I accepted it magnanimously.

“So how do you like living out on Oak Point?” Dione asked Amanda. “It must be exciting, being so close to the water. The primordial soup.”

“The soup’s over on the ocean side,” I said. “The Little Peconic’s more like a broth.”

“I’m happy there,” answered Amanda, ignoring me. “It’s a good place to collect yourself.”

“She’s already joined the neighborhood watch,” I said. “Which mostly involves keeping an eye on the bay”

“So I suppose you know a threat when you see one?” asked Dione, returning to strangle some more bread dough.

“I used to. Now I’m not so sure.”

“More gray areas?”

“More gray hair. Getting harder to keep up.”

Amanda let out a sympathetic little sound and wrapped her arms around me.

“Don’t listen to him. He keeps up fine.”

Dione picked up a slab of dough and slammed it down hard enough to cause a little piece to fly up and hit me on the cheek. She grinned at me and knocked it away with a swift flick of her finger.

“I don’t doubt that to be true.”

Butch appeared in the kitchen wearing a Hawaiian shirt, sandals and baggy off-white cotton pants that stopped at mid-calf His wet hair was combed straight back and his face scrubbed pink. His eyes would widen occasionally, setting off the irises in a field of white. I wondered if he’d trained himself to do that, an appropriate accessory to the mania that surrounded him like static electricity.

“We’re planning to gather in the Great Hall of the Ancients in about five minutes. What sort of fruit do we have? I’m thinking of a big basket, overload it like the horn of plenty.”

“He means the barn,” said Dione. “Will this do?” she asked Butch, pulling a soft woven bag, the kind sophisticates use to haul groceries, down off a high shelf. “I’m not sure what we have in the way of fruit.”

It wasn’t hard for me to imagine, given everything else in the kitchen, that she had an orchard full of apples, peaches and pears piled inside one of the towering cabinets.

“Your call, darling,” he said. “I’ll rally the troops. You bring the fruit and the guests, configured any way that pleases you.”

“I’ll carry the bag,” I said.

The Great Hall of the Ancients was as Dione had said. The original barn built at the same time as the farmhouse, where the guys I used to work for kept racks and bins filled with salvaged parts, a tool crib and several oddball sports cars in various stages of restoration. All of that was gone, replaced by a wide open space, causing me to see for the first time the barn’s beautiful hand-hewn post-and-beam framing. Or maybe it was always there, and I’d only had eyes for machine tools and sheet metal.

In the middle of the center bay people were finding their way to folding chairs set up in a U-shape, inside of which was a small table holding a projector and laptop computer. A screen was mounted on the opposite wall, in front of which Butch stood nervously folding and unfolding a telescoping pointer.

“Sit, sit, sit. We have a lot to cover. Arrange your chairs so you can see the screen, but keep the U-shape. Does anyone know the significance of the broken oval in ancient celestial-based iconography? The rite of the parabola?”

No one bit, preoccupied perhaps with settling into their seats.

“Come on, somebody must know. Fern, Peter, Charles? Are you serious? Amanda?” He looked out at the gathering and shook his head sadly, then popped on a wide grin. “That’s good, because there isn’t such a thing. I made it up. Okay fire up the computer. Let’s see what we’re getting our asses into.”

Without the ski masks and red jumpsuits the group looked like a normal distribution of types. I counted eleven—two girls, one of whom was black, two black men and an Asian guy, I thought Korean or Chinese, and the rest were white men in an assortment of ages and body types, though everyone in the room looked fit and bright eyed. No Evelyn.

The man named Charles worked the laptop and projector. In a moment a stylized image of a metallic finger, slightly curved in the natural way it would, appeared on the screen. It looked like the type of renderings we used to make with an airbrush, now composed on computer with enough shading and detail to look as if someone had lopped off a robot’s middle finger.

“The GF-Double-A,” announced Butch. “The question here before us is not if, but when and how. Or how, and then when, depending on how complicated the how is. Any questions so far?”

“We don’t know how to build it, Butch,” said one of the black guys. “So it’s hard to have any questions yet. Maybe you could give a couple details.”

Heads nodded around the U-shape. Butch looked excited.

“Of course you have questions. My God, how could you not? First some facts. Dione, how big?”

“Thirty-five and a half feet. Thirty-five feet is the height limit zoning puts on residential housing. Let’s see what six inches does to their little heads.”

Smiles and grunts broke out around the room.

“Dione,” said Butch. “What’s it made of?”

“Plate steel. Welded and riveted. Massively heavy so no one can afford to move or destroy it.”

“Edgar, where does it go?

I picked out Edgar from the crowd by his uncomfortable indecision.

“Wherever we want?” he offered.

Butch slapped his pointer on his palm in the style of an impatient field general. Then he pointed it directly at me.

“Our engineering consultant, Sam Acquillo, would like to address that.”

All eyes turned curiously, or maybe hostilely in my direction. There were too many faces to pick out which was which. So I kept my eyes on Butch.

“What do you think it’ll take to get this puppy up in the air?” he asked.

“More than a hydraulic jack. Though you guys make a decent pit crew.”

“Imagination’s more powerful than knowledge,” said the Asian guy.

“Right. Einstein. He also had a lot to say about the kind of energy it takes to control mass, especially within a gravitational field, like the one we got here on earth.”

“Let’s start with earth,” said Butch. “We’ll conquer space in phase two.”

Everybody seemed to like that line. Chatter broke out around the room. They had the easy way about them of a group who’d worked together for a long time. The bond of common purpose, secured by a strong leader in clear control. It would take more than a few minutes to judge all the interplay, but it felt like they’d bought all the way into Butch, happily, if not blindly. The old hands from Boston, Charles and Edgar, closer to my age, were likely lieutenants. The Asian guy, whose name was Scott, was much younger and also spoke with confidence. The young women looked docile, or overwhelmed. But eager. The rest looked like the subcontractors who showed up on Frank’s jobs. Sturdy, with strong hands and work clothes. Lots of scrapes and bruises, the telltales of tough, punishing labor. Edgar, bigger than Charles by at least thirty pounds, had a split lip sewn together with a pair of black stitches.

Butch let things roll along for a while, then pulled the group’s attention back to me.

“Okay,” I said. “First you need a hole at least twice the diameter of the base of the finger, and down about twelve feet, tamped level—likely be sand if you’re talking about the East End. Pour a pad to about six inches above grade with high tensile strength anchor rods set to the depth of the pad. Good quality concrete with lots of rebar.”

“It’ll take a steel fabricator at least a year to form the plates, assuming you can supply the dimensions. Flat steel’s easy, but here you’ll need some precise curving. Very difficult to pull off without sophisticated CAD/CAM, though the French did it in the nineteenth century with the Statue of Liberty. You just have work out the proportionality issues. If it’s going to look like a real human finger, which is almost as wide at the top as at the base, and articulated at two ascending points, you’ll have to cheat the effects of gravity. The steel helps, though I’m not sure what sort of interior framing you’ll need to redistribute the loads. Unless some of you have experience welding up boilers or skyscrapers, you’ll have to bring them in, which raises union issues, which I’m not up on. And a crane, size depending on the weight of the individual sections. All of which assumes you’ve worked out costs, construction permits and catering, none of which is in my purview.”

I sat back and took a sip of my drink. Butch still had the pointer in my direction, which he seemed to realize when I stopped talking. He resumed slapping it on his palm.

“So, it’s basically doable, am I right?” he asked me.

“Sure, anything’s doable that’s been done before. I’m talking the construction, not the idea,” I added quickly, reacting to another of Amanda’s gentle prompts, this time with her knee.

I scanned the faces around the U-shape, hoping to express casual optimism, something that never came naturally to me, though it might have helped me with board members and senior management, who often looked at me with the same vague confusion and disappointment as those gathered in Butch’s Main Hall of the Ancients.

Ever alert to the bummer factor, Dione jumped out of her seat and started distributing fruit from the big market bag. Everyone was equally appreciative of the nourishment and excuse to chatter with each other about something other than the focus of the get-together. As I crunched down on an apple, I looked over at Amanda to check her mood.

“You did fine,” she whispered. “They have to know. Better now.”

Butch waited for the interruption to work its calming effect before re-engaging the group.

“Okay Thoughts.”

It was silent for a few minutes. Butch seemed comfortable letting the dead air sit.

“We should re-evaluate the steel,” said Edgar, finally. “Too limiting in terms of placement and timing.”

“We could simulate the look,” somebody else said. “Make it out of something lighter.”

That started a whirl of commentary around the room that Butch let run on its own.

“But then it’s moveable. Destroyable.”

“Has to be defiant.”

“Subversive.”

“That’s the concept.”

“Steel is a metaphor of industrial exploitation. It’s like a fixed version of Modern Times.”

“The one with Charlie Chaplin.”

“Will take too long. Ruins the element of surprise.”

“What about aluminum?”

“Too space age.”

“No it’s not. It’s like early twentieth century.”

“Flash Gordon.”

“What about the rivets?”

“No rivets.”

“Then we paint it.”

“Flesh color. Like a real finger.”

“Well, then, we’re changing the concept.”

“So what? How about plastic?”

“Still too heavy, I bet.”

“It’s got to be really strong. An act of resistance.”

“Why not go the other way.” I said. “Make it out of ice or tissue paper. Something perishable. Make it about the ephemeral nature of human achievement. The illusion of permanence beloved by authority.”

That immediately killed the chatter. Though I was relieved to see Amanda nodding at me as if both surprised and impressed with my conceptual virtuosity. Not shared by the room, which slowly filled with a leaden silence. But again, Butch seemed content to let the group regain its own bearings.

“That’d really change everything,” said Edgar, kicking things off again.

“Concepts are also ephemeral.”

“We’d be turning an act of disaffection into a throwaway.”

“A. consumable.”

“Temporary art.”

“Isn’t that what Christo does?”

“That’s completely different.”

That set everybody off on a trip through contemporary art theory that quickly left me in the dust. Amanda threw in an observation or two, tentatively, which I was glad no one dismissed without careful review. In fact, I found myself enjoying the flow of commentary around the room, mostly for the collegiality and respect they showed each other, even when asserting contrary points of view. It reminded me of when I’d have a team of engineers on the floor of some steaming production facility trying to root out the cause of an equipment failure, or explain why the results of a bench test were unrepeatable in full scale-up.

“Since our engineering consultant prompted this discussion,” he said, redirecting the group again, “we should ask how he’d execute an ephemera strategy. Sam?”

“I think you’ve equated a heavy steel object with permanence, which it might be symbolically, but not physically. Itd take a long time to create, but a half-day to knock down and cart off. Any commercial demolisher could do it without breaking a sweat. If I understand your objectives right, it doesn’t do the job.”

Butch looked genuinely interested.

“Okay that’s cool. What’re your thoughts?”

“Balloons.”

“Balloons?”

“Lots of them. Not the flimsy kind you blow up for parties, or the things they make for the Macy’s parade, but big like that, same size as your GF-Double-A, but made to look like a real finger. There’re lots of reinforced synthetics that are relatively easy to form into whatever you want, but tough enough to withstand the environment for a long time, and take the air pressure needed to inflate into a standing position. And a lot more affordable, so you could have a bunch of them folded up in the back of pickup trucks. You’d just need a way to anchor the base, and an equal number of compressors running off generators, so you could rapidly deploy them all at the same time, strategically. Or pop them up one at a time, which would be cheaper still. So either way, it’d be a lot easier to pull off, but equally hard for whatever ass you’re intending to shove these up to miss the point, metaphorically speaking of course.”

The room was quiet again for a long time, only this time Butch had the same look of pensive concentration as the others. Amanda was positively beaming at me, out of admiration or relief it was hard to tell. I realized then what a risk she’d taken hauling me to the fundraiser, and then over to Butch’s place. That whenever I looked at her and wondered what mysteries lay hidden beneath the citadel of her cautious reserve she was looking back at me wondering the same thing.

“Motherfucker, I fucking love it,” said Butch, breaking the silence with a sharp smack of the pointer against the big white screen. Dione started clapping, which no one joined in with, but I could see a lot of nodding and grins, producing the fragrance of general agreement.

“Cool,” said Scott. “I can see it.”

“Sure,” said Charles. “Me, too.”

“And we won’t need the WB building,” said Butch, smiling at Amanda. “Is that why you brought him here?”

“Oh, Butch, please,” she said, still too buoyant to take offense.

It took another hour to talk about various technical and logistical considerations. I told them what I could about materials and possible fabricators, and how much they could realistically execute on their own. Most of the discussion involved Edgar, Charlie and Scott, who’d clearly emerged as Butch’s middle management, all of whom had considerable technical education, learned at places like Cal Tech and on the job building Butch’s installations and theater sets. Edgar had even taken some of the same evening courses I’d had at MIT, raising the possibility that we’d sat next to each other in class, though neither of us could remember. I told them I wished I’d had them with me in TS&S, which made them happy, ignoring for a moment they’d have been helping me uphold one of the pillars of authority our current project was intended to defy. The air was thick with collaboration and bonhomie.

The others, all apparently artists-in-training or hangers-on, listened at a safe distance until Butch adjourned the council and invited Amanda and me to stay for dinner. The good vibes aside, I was feeling ready to make a break for it, which Amanda thwarted by immediately accepting the invitation.

“Wonderful. We’ll have fresh bread,” said Dione, herding us out of the Great Hall and back to the house.

In further mockery of social convention, Butch and me and the other boys settled on the screened-in porch with drinks and the women went in to put together the meal.

“You are, like, most definitely the man,” Butch said to me when the others were engaged in a side conversation. “Very cool, the balloon idea.”

“The least I could do for an oil change.”

“You were cool about that, too. I didn’t even know you used to work here. Amanda told me.”

“Selling me out at every step.”

“I downloaded a repair manual on your car from the Internet so we wouldn’t screw anything up. I wouldn’t do that to a man’s car.”

“That’s cool,” I said. “Your guys know what they’re doing.”

“No shit. They’re my sorcerers of technology.”

“Got the cred for it,” I said, invoking Gabe Szwit.

“No shit. Edgar’s a chem engineer, Charles took mechanical.”

“You all came down from Boston?”

“Amanda tell you? Yeah. Edgar and Charlie. Scott’s from the West Coast. Picked him up about ten years ago.”

“Me and Osvaldo,” said Scott, overhearing.

Edgar and Charles stopped their conversation to listen in.

“Hey” said Edgar, with a little bite in his voice.

Scott looked down at his drink.

“Sorry man. We don’t talk about Osvaldo.”

“That’s cool, Scott, no problem,” said Butch. “An Italian dude, from Bologna or something. Had this political thing about art. Too bugged out even for this crowd. Got buggier by the minute.”

“Brilliant dude,” said Scott. “I don’t know what happened.”

“We shunned his ass, like the pilgrims used to do with people caught playing cards, or dancing on Sunday,” said Charles.

“It wasn’t like that,” said Scott.

“Just kidding, man.”

“He was headed someplace else,” said Butch quietly. “I just told him he should go there without us slowing him down. It was all good.”

I felt like it was time for Dione to announce another bummer alert, but she was in the kitchen, so I filled in as best I could.

“I’m ready for another. Anyone else?”

Spirits returned and stayed aloft throughout a giant multi-course dinner, at which all of Dione’s fresh baked loaves of bread were devoured. Bottles of red and white circulated continuously and everyone but Evelyn was eager to jump in and out of the zigzag of conversation that seemed a feature of the gang’s interaction. She was civil enough, but to my sorrow I easily recognized the situation. Amanda tried to engage her a few times, with some success, but it looked like her prime objective was to get some nourishment and then get the hell out of there.

In the Grand Prix on the way back Amanda entertained me with a description of how Dione prepared the meal, in succulent detail, adding to the feeling of satiation.

“So what did you men talk about out on the porch?” she asked. “I’m guessing not baseball or the stock market.”

“Reliving old times in Boston.”

“It’s amazing to think they’ve been together for so long.”

“Lot of ways to make a living.”

“A handsome one, if you go by Butch’s bank statements, which I already said I can’t reveal, so don’t ask.”

“Then quit bringing it up.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be so voyeuristic about it, but it’s impressive when you think how hard it is for artists to make money, much less a whole lot of money”

“So I guess Osvaldo really screwed the pooch.”

“I guess so. I only met him a few times. Seemed just like the rest of them, only with a very nice Italian accent to go with a beautiful Italian face. And athletic build.”

“Quit being so negative.”

“You think Butch doesn’t talk about him, don’t even bring up the name around Dione. Unless you want to see all that kumbaya, love and brotherhood go right out the window.”

“They said he got too radical politically, quite an accomplishment.”

“That’s what I heard, but I never saw it.”

“Too distracted.”

“I’d say the same about you, except for the accent. Maybe not the face either, but you are athletic.”

“Tell me more about how Dione made the crème brûlée.”

Eddie was over at Amanda’s house when we pulled into our common drive. So much for loyalty. She made it worse by giving him another Big Dog biscuit. I might have protested, but she had a reward in mind for me as well, and being as susceptible to placation as the next guy, I acquiesced without further comment.