The Blue Afternoon

Philip looked at me shrewdly, not wholly convinced, as I paid for and received my food. I could see him wondering how many 'old fellows' I might know and why I might want to help them locate a missing person.

'Stop looking at me like that. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to.'

'No, no, I'll see what I can do.'

I could wait no longer. I bit avidly into my chile dog, my nostrils suddenly filled with pungent heat. With a finger I helped a stray ribbon of onion into my mouth. I chewed.

Philip looked at me fastidiously. 'I was going to ask you to di

'Ha-ha. Call me later, you may get lucky.'

When I returned to my office George Fugal was there waiting for me, a wide smile on his narrow face. George was a tall thin forty-year-old with a restless, jumpy demeanour that sat oddly with a professional ma

'So what's the good news?' I asked him.

'We got a buyer for the house. I'm sure. A-' He checked his notebook. 'A Mrs Luard Turner. Pleasant lady. I just showed her around.'

'I'm going to finish it first. I hope she realises that,' I said with some ungrateful belligerence. All at once I felt oddly sad. Someone was going to buy my house. Someone else was going to live in my carefully constructed volumes of air.

'She knows that, she knows that. But she loves the place. Classy, she said. Grade-A class, she said. Her very words, Kay, her very words.'

He chattered on, excited and pleased for me, his gaze leaping from me to Mary to the office door to the trash can. We needed the sale to make the profit to permit K. L. Fischer to survive and move on to bigger and greater things. But I was still feeling my loss keenly.

'We've done it, Kay,' George Fugal said. 'You're there.' I smiled at him. Somehow I did not believe it was ever that easy.

NINE

In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure on, the import of, what remains. If a room is only to have one door and one window then those two openings must conform exactly to the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the ceiling. They must be shaped and styled with intense concentration and focus. One inch, half an inch, can make all the difference between something perfect and something botched. Without decoration, without distraction, proportion becomes the essential factor.

My aesthetic mentor, my inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter (1891-1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by the austere ideologies of Joha

The more I studied Kranewitter the more I came to admire the dedication of the man and the ruthless consistency of his ideas. Rigour, clarity and precision seemed to me attributes that were both admirable and practical. Kranewitter's Armut is not something miserable and deprived: it has a liberating, purgative quality to it. The more the twentieth century advances and the more crassly complicated our lives become and the more the hectoring injunctions of the commercial world intrude – eat! buy! play! spend! enjoy! -and come to dominate our every waking moment, so do the calm and emptiness, the clean, unimpeded, untrammelled nature of the world Kranewitter tried to create grow ever more appealing.

These were ambitions that I tried to realise and incorporate in my own work and they are manifestly embodied in the two completed buildings I designed – the Taylor house in Pasadena, and the Burbank shopping mart. Everything extraneous is stripped away. The interiors are ruthlessly plain, the only lines are vertical or horizontal. Even in such a temple of self-indulgence as a shopping mart -the American antithesis of Armut – Kranewitter's ascetic philosophy is evident. And it works.

It worked so well it cost me my job. The success of the Burbank mart meant that Meyersen and Fischer were approached by Ohman's Retail Group to design their new store and restaurant complex on Wilshire Boulevard. I did the initial drawings and plans, and had a scale model constructed. Shortly before the final contracts were signed, Eric Meyersen called me into his office and informed me that I was fired. When I asked him why, he said, equably, 'No real reason, honey. I just don't want to see your face around here any more, I guess.' Meyersen had, to put it simply, got what he needed from me – a body of work, a small but growing reputation, a style. Now, with the Ohman deal secure, he figured he could go it alone. Fugal looked at the document of partnership I had signed so avidly five years previously and duly unearthed the subclauses that granted Meyersen this unilateral power. I told him to sue the bastard in any case. Writs were served as the Ohman's Building contract was signed by Eric Meyersen Architects Inc. The Taylor house and the Burbank mart records were similarly altered. My only course of action was to go out on my own and show the world who really was responsible for these buildings.2265 Micheltoreno would be the first nail in Meyersen's coffin.