The Locked Room

On Tuesday you wear sneakers, and Ulla Rademacher looks at your feet for one full second and says nothing, which Tadashi Aoki later informs you is the equivalent of a parade.

"She noticed," he says. "And didn't comment. Do you understand what that means?"

"That she's tired?"

"She's never tired. She's a German glacier. Glaciers don't get tired, they just slowly destroy valleys." He's wearing a headlamp, unironically, because the basement model shop has the worst light in Manhattan and he refuses on principle to ask for better. "It means you passed the shoe test. Gregory, number six, never passed the shoe test. Gregory wore loafers with tassels."

"What happened to Gregory?"

"Gregory is a very happy real estate agent in Connecticut."

The model shop smells like basswood and hot glue and the faint chemical sweetness of laser-cut acrylic. Every surface is covered: towers under construction, a stadium in pieces, a tiny city of white foam blocks. Tadashi is twenty-nine, slight, with a sharp undercut and a cardigan covered in sawdust, and he has adopted you with the aggressive warmth of someone who's been lonely down here for a while.

He slides open a drawer. It's full of candy.

"Sour or chocolate, Ava?"

"Is this a test?"

"Everything's a test. Sour."

You take a sour worm. He looks pleased.

"Full disclosure," he says, "there's a pool. On you. I had you at three weeks." He winces. "That was before the wind thing. Now I'm thinking I should've gone longer."

"Everybody knows about the wind thing?"

"Babe. Phineas came in Tuesday morning and the wind study consultant was already on the phone with Ulla, and Ulla was saying 'marginal' in a voice I'd describe as a slow-motion guillotine." He grins. "Everybody knows. Phineas is being extremely nice to you now. Watch out for that."

Phineas is, in fact, extremely nice to you.

He brings you a latte on Wednesday ("I didn't know how you take it, so I guessed"), which is a joke about your coffee for Ulla, which means he was watching. He compliments your sketchbook. He asks where you went to school and nods slowly when you tell him, the way people nod when they're storing something for later.

"Varick's going to be the big one this year," he says, leaning on your desk. "You'll hear a lot about it. Don't get caught in the middle."

"The middle of what?"

He smiles like it's adorable that you asked.

You find out on Thursday, when a man in a gray cashmere coat walks onto the third floor and every designer straightens up like a sunflower.

Hallvard Aldane is in his late fifties, silver-haired, tall, with the long Nordic face of a statesman on a postage stamp. He's handsome in a way that's been maintained, deliberately, like a classic car. He shakes your hand with both of his.

"The twelfth. Ava, isn't it?" he says warmly. "Ulla's very lucky. I hope she knows it."

"Thank you, Mr. Aldane."

"Hallvard. Please. I was building here when Ulla was still drawing staircases for me." His smile doesn't change. "Is she in?"

She is. He goes into her office and closes the glass door, and because the door is glass, everybody can see everything and nobody can hear a word. They don't sit, because there's nowhere to sit. Hallvard talks with his hands open, reasonable. Ulla stands at her drafting table with her arms folded and says maybe four words.

Phineas's in-house scheme for Varick Street is pinned on the main wall of the studio, where everyone can see it. It's handsome. Brick and bronze, a solid tower, the kind of building a bank would like.

The other scheme isn't pinned anywhere.

"It's in there," Tadashi says, nodding at the door at the end of the floor. Frosted glass, the only frosted glass in the building. A keypad. "The review room. She's had it locked since November."

"What's in it?"

"Entry 0412." He says it like the name of a saint. "The Open Call. Every year Ulla runs this anonymous competition for young designers, students, people with no portfolio. You submit a scheme, your name goes in a sealed envelope with the studio's lawyer, and nobody knows who you are unless the studio builds it. Usually nothing gets built. Usually it's like, a nice pavilion, a bus shelter, someone gets a check and a handshake." He lowers his voice. "This year she pulled one out of three hundred entries and decided it's the building for Varick Street. A whole tower. A student's tower. From the slush pile."

"And Hallvard..."

"Hallvard thinks she's lost her mind. The board wants Phineas's scheme. Safe, buildable, nobody gets embarrassed. Ulla wants 0412." He shrugs. "Nobody's seen it except her and the board. She won't even let me build the model. She built it herself. At night."

You look at the frosted door. Through it, you can see the blurred shapes of boards on the walls, pale rectangles, one dark tall shape in the center of the room that might be a model.

Something prickles at the back of your neck.

You don't know why.

Friday night, Ulla is still in her office at eleven.

Everyone else is gone. The studio is dark except for her glass box at the corner, lit like a lantern, and the long white worktables glowing faintly in the light from the street. You should go home. You've been here since seven. She hasn't asked you to stay.

She hasn't eaten. You know because you've been watching, which you'd deny under oath. She had a black coffee at nine and nothing since. You've seen her stop twice and press two fingers between her eyebrows and keep going.

At 11:15 you go down the block to the dumpling place on Hudson, the one with the steamed-up windows. You get pork and chive, and a vegetable one in case, and you carry the warm bag back up three flights of stairs.

You knock on the glass. She looks up.

"I don't eat at the office," she says.

"I know. I read that too." You set the container on the corner of her drafting table, as far from her drawings as you can. "I'm not here. These aren't here. Good night, Ms. Rademacher."

You're at the elevator before she speaks.

"Ava."

You turn. She's standing behind the glass with her hand flat on the drafting table next to the container, like it's a small animal she's not sure is safe.

"Go home," she says. And then, after a second: "Thank you."

The train takes forever. The walk from the Jefferson stop is cold and smells like snow coming. Waverly's asleep. You get into bed with your coat still on, too tired to take it off, and stare at the ceiling and think about the frosted door and the blurred dark shape behind it, and Ulla's hand on the table, and the word thank you in that sharpened accent.

It's almost one when your phone lights up.

Not an email this time. A text. From a number you saved on your first day and never thought you'd see on your screen.

You open it.

Did you eat. That wasn't a question.

And while you're still staring at it, the dots appear. She's typing.