The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin

that their eyes were on him. It was impossible to discern except indirectly, by noting that the upper parts of their bodies seemed immobile in comparison to the far greater fluidity of the rest. When people walk, everything moves, except when they are anxiously fixed upon a destination.
    They had probably brought the architect. Fitch hated architects the way anyone might hate someone who demeans him for not being able to realize perfectly a bunch of vague instructions in service of foolish and unnecessary theories. Not a week before and in the presence of the client, Fitch had answeredan architect’s hectoring and accusative question with the words, “Because, if I hadn’t put it there, the upper floors would have collapsed, that’s why. You forgot to support them properly. It was correct on the early drawings, but you left it out of the finals. Perhaps your hand slipped when you were clutching your automatic pencil.”
    “I don’t use an automatic pencil,” the architect had said, his face the color of a cherry.
    “You should,” Fitch said as the architect stormed out, “it would do a better job.” And, then, to the distressed client, “Don’t worry. He’s not building this, he just thinks he is.”
    Neither an architect nor Lilly’s husband was flanking her, but two older people who walked as stiffly as cranes. Divorce, thought Fitch, and a bad one. He left
her
. Screwed her. Her parents are paying for the apartment and holding her up between them. As badly as the woman might take it, for the parents to see their child wounded was far worse. These people were in their seventies and probably their most fervent prayer was that she would be happy again before they died. Fearing that she would not be, they would be so protective that they would treat Fitch like a plunderer.
    They were suspicious, as Fitch knew quite well anyone has the right to be upon meeting a contractor, and they seemed so reserved and so intent upon protection that it was as if they had said, “If you do anything to harm our daughter or exploit her in any way, we will eviscerate and burn you.”
    The father was tall and thin, with an old-fashioned brush mustache, very neat. He too had dark horn-rims and an intelligent face. He wore a gray greatcoat, a plaid scarf, and no hat. He looked like Robert Trout. To Fitch’s relief, the mother was not in a fur. Every winter day in New York Fitch passed a hundred thousand old ladies doddering along in furs. Though they could afford them, they could not carry them. Someone of fragile build in a fur coat always seemed to Fitch to have been devoured by a wolf or a bear. If underneath a heavy fur there was not a gorgeous fertile body, it was just the preface to a funeral.
    Fitch himself, at fifty-three, might have been taken for a bear. His massive face appeared to be bigger than the faces of the three people he was about to meet even had their faces been fused into one. His immense hands werestrong from wielding hammers. His body was like a barrel. And yet he had the same quality of expression, the same kind of glasses, the same careful and thoughtful look, as they did. Were the parents academics, like their daughter, they would have their higher degrees, as she did, and as he did, too, although he had never done anything with his except, in the sixties, earn them.
    It was his nature to read rather than to write, to listen rather than to speak. Erudite and learned, he had been overcome at an early age, upon the death of his father, with a reticence that would never leave him. As if guarding what he knew and saving it for heaven, he confined his output to the production of beautiful rooms with plaster moldings as white as wedding cakes, with deep and glistening floors, magnificent cabinetry, walls like smooth prairies, and tranquil effects of light and shadow. That was his output, and all the rest, all his knowledge and contemplation, which was so immense that it seemed to require his very large body to