The Architecture of a Stray Lock of Hair

Cristina had no idea—none—of what she could do to a room just by sitting in it. She would fold herself into my father’s old leather armchair, one leg tucked under her, and read. The amber light through the dusty blinds caught the gold in her hair, and I would forget whatever I had been saying.

We met three weeks earlier at a reading on Avenue B. A basement where the pipes sweated and the poets either bombed or transcended. I noticed her because she was the only person not checking her phone. She stood there with a glass of cheap wine and listened. She was beautiful, but that wasn’t it. She seemed indifferent to being beautiful, which in New York functions almost as an act of aggression.

Italian. From Bologna. A year at Pratt for architecture. Her English was better than mine, with just enough accent to remind you she came from somewhere else. She said “actually” like a question, a small uptick at the end that made everything sound like a gentle correction.

Actually, she would say, I think it’s the other way around.

And I believed her.

She showed up in late October with a bottle of Sangiovese and a bag of blood oranges. She peeled one with a paring knife, the skin falling away in a single spiral, her fingers stained red. White t-shirt with a neon-pink band logo, some obscure German group. The shirt hung off one shoulder.

She wore too many necklaces. Silver chains, a pearl, small stones, all tangled. They moved when she breathed.

I was talking about Proust—about memory as violence, as ambush—because I thought it might impress her. I had practiced the phrase in my head on the walk home from the subway. Memory as ambush. I thought it sounded like something a person who had read Proust might say.

She listened the way she did. Head tilted. Eyes focused somewhere just past my shoulder.

You talk about memory, she said, like it’s a wound.

Isn’t it?

She considered this. She had a way of considering things that made you feel measured.

My mother calls every Sunday, she said. I let it ring. Then I listen to the voicemail.
She talks for three minutes about nothing. The neighbor’s dog. The tomatoes. Then she says,
“Cristina, when are you coming home?” Every time. Same words.

She peeled another orange.

That’s my memory, she said. A voicemail I don’t delete. It’s not a wound. It’s just—
there.

She looked at me.

You should read something else, she said. Proust is for people who have time.

Here is what I knew:

She was twenty-six. She was failing studio. Her professor had called her work “derivative” in front of everyone, and she had laughed, and then gone home and not slept. She was broke. Her visa was a mess. Marco, the ex, still texted her sometimes, and she sometimes answered.

She liked black coffee and the smell of rain. She read three books at once. Her laugh started low in her chest and built into something like surprise, as if she hadn’t expected to find anything funny.

She bit her nails. She had a scar on her left wrist, thin and white, that she never explained.

I am an architect. Not the kind who builds. The kind who draws. I sit in an office in Midtown and render other people’s visions in CAD, and I go home, and I draw my own buildings on paper, buildings no one will ever build, buildings that exist only because I cannot stop making them.

I know how to look at something and see its structure. I know how to calculate load and stress and the exact point where a beam will fail.

I did not know how to look at Cristina without trying to build her.

She called me one night in November. Not to come over. To ask for something.

I need help, she said. With my project. The professor—he wants me to redo
everything. I have four days. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Her voice was different. Flat. Not the voice she used when she talked about memory or doors. The voice of someone who had been crying and was done with it.

She came over with her laptop and a roll of trace paper and a bag of cheap pastries from the bodega. She spread everything on my floor. She was wearing sweatpants. No necklaces. Her hair was pulled back in a way that made her look younger and harder.

We worked for six hours. She was not charming. She was not mysterious. She was frustrated and sharp, and she snapped at me twice—once when I suggested a different approach, once when I asked if she’d eaten. She said, I don’t need a mother. Then she apologized. Then she snapped at me again.

At some point she pushed up her sleeve, and I saw the scar on her wrist. Thin, white, almost invisible. She caught me looking. She pulled the sleeve down. Neither of us said anything.

I liked her like this. I want to be honest about that. I liked that she needed me. I liked that she was exhausted and not beautiful and still working. I liked that for once she was not a woman in an armchair but a person on my floor, asking me to hand her the ruler. I liked it more than I should have. I felt ashamed of liking it.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

At three in the morning, she fell asleep on the floor, her head on a rolled-up hoodie. Her mouth was open. She looked terrible. I covered her with a blanket and sat in the armchair and watched her breathe.

I did not want to touch her. I want to be clear about this. I did not want to touch her. I wanted the other thing. The thing that came before touching. The thing that happens when someone is still a possibility.

Another night—a week before that, I think, though I’ve lost the order—we were on the couch. Past midnight. A film played. French, black and white. Breathless, maybe. I wasn’t watching. I was watching her watch it. The flickering light on her face. Her lips forming silent words.

Her leg pressed against mine. Not deliberately. Just the physics of two bodies on a couch too small for the distance we were trying to maintain.

Her hand rested on the cushion between us. Long fingers, short nails. A callus on her index finger from holding pencils.

I stayed still, gripping the edge of the couch. The radiator clanked. Her knee touched mine. She didn’t move. The film played.

She turned to look at me. Not at the television—at me. A stray lock of hair hung across her face. I could see her pulse in her throat.

What are you thinking?

She asked it like she already knew.

I didn’t answer.

Because what I was thinking was: If I touch you now, I will never stop.

What I was thinking was: I am already lost.

But I said nothing. I just looked at her—at that lock of hair, at her parted lips, at the pulse in her throat.

She waited.

I could have said something.

I didn’t.

She turned back to the film.

She left early the next morning. Before the sun. I watched her from the window. Coat pulled tight, boots on the sidewalk, breath leaving small white clouds. She didn’t look back.

Maybe she’d made a decision. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she just had studio at nine and a professor who already hated her.

I never asked.

I saw her once more, six months later. A café in the West Village. Her hair was shorter. A man sat across from her—tall, blond, the kind of person who belonged in this city in a way I never would. She laughed at something he said. She pushed her hair back—that same gesture, that same lock—and I felt the old ache.

I didn’t go in. I didn’t wave.

I walked home.

I still think about her. The weight of her leg against mine. The smell of her hair. The sound of her voice saying my name—which she said wrong, actually, stressing the second syllable, and I never corrected her.

I think about what would have happened if I’d crossed that space. If I’d brushed that lock of hair away from her face. If I’d kissed her.

Maybe she’s in Bologna now, listening to her mother’s voicemails.

I still draw. Every night, the same building. A house with a door and no windows. I draw it in pencil, then in ink. I measure the proportions. I calculate the load. I know exactly where it would fail.

I never draw the inside.