One afternoon is like another

Encountering an acquaintance while out walking a few days ago, he was surprised by her question, “What are you exactly?” A poet, he supposed, like his wife was a painter, but they’d long practiced as architects together. They met in school and found they detested the big firms it saw as their fate. Moving west, they opened a tiny office in the hills, in a carriage house that was split into two parts to form the entry of the large house behind.

As architects, they were complementary, as they’d been at school. She brought her aesthetic and he brought the kind of rigor that could be found in his poems, a sense of lines that had to scan, whereas her sense of them fell into place in an entirely different way. Yet they made it work.

She modeled for women artists, and they painted each other and each other’s families. She talked it through with clients while he listened and took notes. He wrote it up as scenes, brief stories she read and sometimes gave to clients to read. This method won them a devoted following, word of mouth at first and then queries: “I saw my friend’s house.”

In between the houses was what they felt was their own work. They never exactly said this to each other, because they were architects, after all, and bespoke, a practice bordering on art and involving a devoted army that provided the craft. They saw themselves as Slow in the Tuscan/Alice Waters sense, compensating for its leisure-class overtones by hewing to scales appropriate for a human experience of nature. This looked back to regional ancestors, which was okay with them. “Regional” didn’t scare them.

She’s sometimes rouse herself, have a studio exhibit and sale of her work. Before it opened, he’d take a few things, small portraits he put up in his writing room in their country house, along with other painters’ portraits of her. If he’d had any talent for painting; she’d be his model like Bonnard’s wife had been. Bonnard, Matisse, and Diebenkorn were her tradition.

The scenes that came to mind from listening to ther clients spoke to how light played through rooms and how they opened to a garden, with its terrace, and a view. Traveling, they noted how this ran through the most disparate places, a hunger for it that must be fundamental to how some humans create a world to which they can relate. This was a reasonable summary of what their work provided to others of that sort.

This was what their work provided. It was published by editors who found it resonant, prompted by photographers who saw it, too. They were always mentioned by their clients, and the scenes he wrote were usually quoted.

“What exactly are you?” is a journalist’s question, he realized. The acquaintance fell in that category. When they met again six or so weeks later, he asked her if she was writing a novel. She blanched, he saw, so he rescued her: “I’m also writing one. I find that fiction’s as useful as poetry.”

“I decided early on not to be a working poet, but just to write poems,” he added. “It comes down to others’ expectations. It’s why we still practice. Those houses pay the bills, take the credit, and draw the criticism. It doesn’t preclude ambition. A friend, also an architect, saw Borromini as his competition. My ambitions don’t run that way, but I work within a tradition and what’s happening around me filters in, inevitably, because it’s here and now, not back then. The themes are perennial, even if the details vary. Humans are human, and nature is nature.”

One afternoon is like another, he thought, walking back. It was like Pessoa’s take on Lisbon, each moment of it he experienced memorably the same.