Free The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin Page A

he did not turn her down he would lose half a dozen other jobs—he was indirect. “The question is,” he said, “how long can you stay where you’re staying? Because we’re so backed up. I’ve got jobs scheduled one after another for. …”
    “I’m staying with my parents,” she interrupted, “in Westchester. It’s not a problem. When would you be free?”
    “Two years,” he said. Usually, he enjoyed saying that, because of what it meant about his work, his business, and himself. But, this time, he didn’t enjoy it.
    “Two years?”
    “Look,” said Fitch, for no reason that he could discern save something in her voice, “if it’s small, if it’s a small job. …”
    “It isn’t,” she told him, expecting that the conversation would soon end. “A kitchen, two bathrooms, moving some walls, painting, floors, windows, everything.”
    “Let me look at it,” Fitch said. This made no sense, because he could not afford to take on anything new. It was one of those decisions that contractors make, in memory and fear of lean times, that subsequently they cannot honor. “I’m going to be in Brooklyn in the afternoon. If you like, I can meet you there. What time would be convenient?”
    “Can we make it later, in case of problems at the closing? How about five o’clock? I should be able to get there by then.”
    “See you then,” Fitch said. “If you’re not there, don’t worry. I’ll wait for you, Lilly.”
    She was pleased that he had remembered her name. “How long?” she asked, which seemed strange, even to her.
    “Until you arrive,” he replied.
    “There’s no lobby.”
    “That’s all right, they don’t let me wait in lobbies anyway.”
    “Thank you.”
    A bus went by, and in its ugly brown roar the connection vanished.
    A S HE WAS WALKING in the cold wind and blinding sun, he recalled this woman and her husband. They were almost young enough to be his children.The husband, who worked on Wall Street, wore dark horn-rims and had the face of a rabbinical student. A genius of sorts in the abstract, he had delicate hands and seemed actually to fear the resistant power of the apartment’s walls and woodwork that had to be pulled apart and put together again. Fitch knew that this was because of the precision of his nature, that what he feared was the breaking of more than had to be broken, the pulling out of more than had to be pulled out, and the damage to parts that were to remain, creating in irreparable shattering not only more work than was necessary, but chaos as well.
    A contractor, however, learns early on to deal with chaos, and the technique is simple: if you can build, you need not fear the terrors of demolition. For example, if you know how to build a window-opening into a wall, how to set a window in it, how even to build a window itself, and how to do the trim and painting around it, you need not fear any of the process of taking the window out, for you can go down clear to the bone and come back cleanly, rebuilding, better than in a partial repair.
    Like her husband, she was delicate and dark. Graceful and beautiful, she had treated Fitch and his men neither patronizingly nor with false sympathy, as was often the case when clients dealt with the Fitch Company. An academic, she taught classics and was working for tenure at Columbia. “That’s my country,” Gustavo had said dryly.
    As Fitch walked, he thought about her closing and then his own, when he had sold his apartment on the Upper West Side before moving to Chelsea. He had owned the apartment in the clear, and was sitting calmly at a table with half a dozen lawyers, waiting out the hours of paper shuffling, when a man burst into the room and, with evident pleasure, held up his right index finger and declared, “I’m from the Hapsburg Fund, and nothing closes here until we say so!”
    He had the wrong room. Nevertheless, everyone froze, even Fitch, though only momentarily, for, having no mortgage, he had nothing to