Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Eight: What Ellie Said

Ellie visited the office in July.

She came on a Friday afternoon — the summer afternoon, the long July light, the light that stayed until nine. She had not telephoned ahead. She arrived at the office door with a canvas bag and a thermos and said: I thought you might want company in the long afternoon.

He had been at the drawing board since eight. The city library sections — the seven rooms in pencil, the pencil studies pinned above the board, the drawings being refined one by one before the ink. He had been drawing for nine hours and his hand was tired. He was glad of the company.

She put the thermos on the desk and looked at the drawings.

She looked at them for a long time — the seven pencil studies arranged in order above the drawing board, the reading room section and the children's corner study and the periodicals room and the study carrels and the local history room and the reference section and the large general reading area. She looked at them in the way she had always looked at the sections — from the inside, the attending look, the person reading the drawing as the inside view.

She said: you have drawn seven rooms from the inside.

He said: yes.

She was quiet for a moment. She looked at the reading room section — the reader at the centre, the room drawn outward, the west glazing with the division line. She looked at the children's corner study — the lower ceiling and the radiator at forty centimetres and the shelves. She looked at the large room study — the attending zones, the acoustic separation indicated by the pencil hatching.

She said: the practice used to draw one room at a time. Now you are drawing seven rooms as a correspondence.

He thought about this. He had not thought about it in those terms — the seven rooms as a correspondence rather than seven separate sections. He thought about the seven rooms of the city library and the correspondence between them — the reading room and the children's corner and the local history room all serving the sustained attending in different degrees, the reference section serving the short attending, the large general reading area holding all the conditions simultaneously. He thought about the seven rooms as the library's attending correspondence — the rooms in relation to each other, each room's honest condition supported by the honest conditions of the others.

He thought: the seven rooms are not seven separate sections. The seven rooms are one correspondence.

He said: tell me more.

Ellie looked at the drawings again. She said: when you draw one room you draw the inside view of one attending condition. The coastal classroom is the inside view of the coastal attending. The community centre is the inside view of the between-time attending. Each section draws one inside view. But the city library has seven inside views and they are all in the same building. The building holds seven attending conditions simultaneously. The sections have to show not only each condition from the inside but how the conditions relate to each other inside the same building.

He thought about the sections showing how the conditions related to each other. He thought about the seven sections and their relation — the reading room's sustained attending and the reference section's short attending in the same building, the children's corner's low ceiling and the large room's open volume in the same building, the local history room's reflective quiet and the students' collaborative noise in the same building. He thought about the sections as individual and the library as the whole — the individual sections correct but the whole not yet drawn.

He thought: the seven sections are correct individually. The building as a whole is the eighth drawing.

He said: the eighth drawing.

Ellie said: yes. The drawing that shows how the seven conditions are related. The drawing that shows the attending person how to move through the library — which room for which attending, which condition for which hour of the day, which room to leave and which room to go to. The building as the correspondence between its own rooms.

He thought about the building as the correspondence between its own rooms. He thought about the community centre — the weight-bearing room and the kitchen and the corner and the bench outside, the rooms in relation. He thought about the hatch as the drawing of the relation between the kitchen and the weight-bearing room — the opening that made the two rooms into a correspondence. He thought about the city library as the building with seven rooms that needed their own hatch — not a physical hatch but the drawn relation, the section that showed how the seven attending conditions were in correspondence.

He thought: every honest building has its correspondence between rooms. The city library needs that correspondence drawn.

Ellie poured the tea from the thermos. She passed him a cup and sat in the chair beside the drawing board and looked at the seven studies. She said: the building that holds multiple attending conditions is the building that asks the attending person a question. The question is: which room are you today? The honest building that holds multiple conditions gives the attending person the right room for the right attending.

He thought about the building asking which room are you today. He thought about the city library asking this question — the person who arrived at the library and found the correct room for their attending that day: the reading room for the sustained deep work, the reference section for the quick question, the children's corner for the small attending, the local history room for the reflective quiet. He thought about the library as the building that gave the attending person the correct attending for the day they were having rather than the day they had planned.

He thought: the honest building that holds multiple conditions is the most responsive building.

He thought about the community centre. He thought about the community centre holding the between-time attending in multiple rooms — the weight-bearing room and the kitchen and the corner and the south bench outside. He thought about Raymond moving between the kitchen and the weight-bearing room through the hatch correspondence. He thought about the community centre as the building that had held multiple attending conditions and had drawn their relations in the hatch and the bench and the covered approach.

He thought: the community centre drew the correspondence between its rooms without knowing it was drawing an eighth section.

He thought about the eighth section. He thought about the eighth section as the section the practice had not yet drawn — the drawing that showed the building as a whole, the attending conditions in relation, the correspondence between the rooms made visible in a single drawing. He thought about the eighth section for the city library as the drawing Thomas needed as much as the seven room sections — the drawing that answered the question which room are you today, the drawing that gave the attending person the whole building as a system of related honest conditions.

He said to Ellie: the eighth section. The building as the correspondence between its rooms. I have not drawn this before.

She said: you have been drawing it all along. The hatch in the community centre. The covered approach. The corridor in the coastal school that connects the east window to the corner. The bench between the two attending conditions. Every building has its correspondence between rooms. You have been drawing it in the details without knowing it was a section.

He thought about drawing the eighth section in the details without knowing it was a section. He thought about the hatch and the covered approach and the corridor and the bench — all the threshold drawings, all the between-room drawings, all the drawings of the attending person in motion between one condition and another. He thought about all of these as fragments of the eighth section — the eighth section assembled piece by piece across twelve years without being drawn whole.

He thought: the eighth section has been assembling itself. I have not yet drawn it complete.

He wrote in the pocket notebook after Ellie had gone: Ellie's visit — July. The seven rooms as one correspondence, not seven separate sections. The eighth section: the building as the correspondence between its rooms. I have been drawing it in the details all along — the hatch, the approach, the threshold, the bench. The eighth section has been assembling itself. The city library needs it drawn whole. The honest building that holds multiple attending conditions asks the attending person: which room are you today? The eighth section answers.

He looked at the seven pencil studies above the drawing board and thought about the eighth drawing not yet begun. He thought about the correspondence between the rooms — the attending person moving through the city library from the reading room to the local history room to the children's corner, the honest building giving the right room for the right attending at the right hour.

He thought: tomorrow I begin the eighth section.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Eight