He tried not to watch her, either. There was nothing remarkable about what she was doing, or wearing. Her bathing suit was exactly the kind a woman doing laps for exercise would wear. He blurred his eyes on purpose, though he wasn’t sure why. She became an inky blot moving through the water.
He was startled when she suddenly broke the pattern, like a single bird deviating from its migratory V. She surfaced near him and held on to the pool’s edge, water cascading from her head and the golden hair on her arms glistening in the sun.
He watched her mouth moving but didn’t hear any sound coming out, which was funny because her almost-silent laps had, mere moments ago, been a waterfall in his ears.
“Sorry, what?” he asked, entertaining the notion that perhaps he was experiencing some sort of adverse neurological event. Why else would he be feeding birds and watching people talk without hearing any sound?
“Do you want to go do something out in the world?”
He looked at her for a moment—too long a moment, apparently, because she rescinded the invitation. “Forget it.”
“No, no, I’m just trying to tell myself I need to work.”
“I need to work, too.”
“Yet you’re home from work early,” he said, once again stating the obvious. But it was the second time that had happened recently.
“It was a rough day. I asked my boss if I could take the rest of the day off.” Her bright hazel eyes twinkled, and she shoved off the side of the pool and onto her back. Floating, she said no more.
He wanted to inquire about this rough day, but then he asked himself why. Why did he care? “Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She spoke to the sky. “I just thought it would be good to get out of my own head.” She flipped and paddled to the edge of the pool farthest from him, hoisting herself out. Water rained down from her body. “But I don’t need you for that.”
He thought of Esme accusing Blair of avoiding her friends, of never going out.
“Have you ever been to the Watts Towers?” he blurted at her back as she headed for the main house.
She turned. “I haven’t.” She paused. “Do you want to go?”
“I’ve read about them.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I just…” He couldn’t believe he was about to tell her this. Henever talked about his works in progress. “There’s a character in my book who’s teaching herself to crochet. She’s not making a blanket or anything; she’s just compelled to keep crocheting. It got me thinking about what motivates people to create things like that when there’s no one asking for it, no audience. Where it’s just self-propelled. Art for art’s sake.”
“Or it’s a compulsion,” she said, hitting on exactly the question he was asking.
“Right.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Is it too far to drive?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking. Was he trying to backpedal?
“Oh, who cares? What else are we going to do? Not write books and not make movies? Let’s go look at some fucking art.”
He was a bit startled by her vehemence, by the uncharacteristic profanity—when Blair “swore,” she said something liketarnationormy stars.
Perhapsstartledwasn’t a strong enough word. Perhaps he wasstunned, which would explain why he found himself, half an hour later, in Blair Kellermoon’s pink car, cruising down the freeway on the way to look at some fucking art.
They arrived at a small museum dedicated to a series of towers built from the 1920s to the 1950s by an Italian immigrant who, to hear it told, was single-minded in his dedication to his creation.
There were seventeen interconnected towers of varying sizes, the tallest of which, they were informed, was ninety-nine and a half feet. They were made of mesh-wrapped concrete, though you didn’t look at them and think “concrete,” given that they were inlaid with glass and tile and studded with found objects. He saw lots of shiny bits: parts of bed frames, mirror shards, seashells, bottles. It reminded him of crows, and the kinds of baubles they delivered to the humans who inspired their devotion.
It was hard to know how to make sense of it. “The curious thing,” he said as he and Blair made their second circuit of the grounds, “is he was a construction worker and mason, right? Andthiswas what he wanted to do in his free time? I guess itwasa compulsion.”
“Do you think it was an actual, clinical compulsion?” she asked. “Or are you just using that word colloquially, the way people do?”
Jack had always thought that the way you got to know people was gradually. That had generally been the case for him, whether it came to his students or the few friends he’d made as an adult.
