When the café is finished, he’s contracted to build several book-matched conference tables for various corporate offices in Manhattan, including Holtcorp, Shell, and Weyerhaeuser—companies that Willow warred against all her life. It isn’t until he’s been living in New York for two years, and he’s renovating yet another Brooklyn craft brewery with some expensive old-growth redwood, that he meets Meena Bhattacharya, who’s helping the owner, her long-time friend, make decor decisions. Though they’ve been introduced, Liam buries his nose in his work whenever he sees Meena, who is lovely in a hundred ways previously unknown to him.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” she asks Liam one day while he’s bent over his table saw, preparing to make a finicky cut. “What if you touch the blade? You won’t make any more beautiful things without fingers.”
“This thing eats gloves for breakfast,” Liam says, pointing at the saw blade. “And gloves can make you careless, so it’s better to work without them. Also, I like to be close to the wood.”
The next day she asks him to meet her for coffee after work, and they sit in a busy café cramped together at a counter that Liam once built, though he’s too shy to mention it. It’s the first time he’s properly sat down—other than to shit, drive, or fly—in months. “I’m happy to see that your hands are still intact,” she says, prompting him to examine hers, which are similarly callused and corded with sinew. He learns that she’s the first-chair viola of the Los Angeles Symphony, and has been booked for a six-month stint of performances at Lincoln Center. She’s clever, funny, and outspoken, though all her political views seem perfectly reasonable, or at the very least grounded in fact. She grew up as an only child of aspirational parents in a suburb of Delhi. “I chose the electric guitar, and my parents chose the cello,” she says dryly. “My mother actually called the viola a compromise.”
The next weekend, Liam takes Meena to the Museum of Natural History to see the cross-section of a giant sequoia that was cut from a forest where he and Willow often camped. During the subway ride he tells Meena about his mother for the first time, making her activism sound more idealistic than fanatical, and her distracted parenting more eccentric than hurtful. But at the museum, he’s disappointed to discover that the sequoia has been varnished over, so they can’t smell the rich tannins in the naturally rot-resistant redwood that he’d been describing. Meena is impressed nonetheless, and afterwards invites him back to her apartment for the first time.
Each weekend over the following months, Liam and Meena take drives upstate to fetch reclaimed materials for his jobs. They pay farmers for weather-beaten planks or beams, then load them into the van while the farmers regard them like they’re escaped mental patients. At first, she’s game enough to take up a nail-puller and help bring down some old fences and stables, but after she gouges her thumb sufficiently to require a tetanus shot and nearly has to cancel a performance, she’s content to perch on a fence rail and watch him work.
“I’m not a big fan of the term ‘reclaimed wood,’ ” Meena says one Saturday as they’re headed back to the city.
“Here we go,” Liam says, reaching over to squeeze her knee to show he’s only kidding.
“It begs the question: reclaimed from what? Or, more specifically, from who? The answer is from people who are using it wrong. Poor people. People with no taste. People who don’t deserve it.”
People like me, Liam thinks but doesn’t say.
“Why is it that the rich always want to buy back the few things they’ve allowed the poor to have? Is it to remind them that nothing is theirs, not truly?”
Yet despite Meena’s strong opinions, she couldn’t be more different than Willow: she’s disciplined, rooted, slow-moving, thoughtful, and chemically conservative—a single glass of white wine the most reckless inebriation she’ll ever submit to. Liam loves how, immediately upon entering his van, she always plugs her phone into his stereo and floods his ears with music. Despite her classical training, she can’t bear to hear orchestral pieces on her personal time. Her great love is sixties soul, which she belts out while shimmying in the seat beside him. “Be My Baby,” “Baby Love,” “Baby I Need Your Loving.” For someone who claims to be delaying motherhood until her career is established, he teases, it’s an unsettling amount of babies.
It’s during these drives that he first gets the idea to build his own studio, somewhere rural and away from the city, where he’ll make custom furniture of his own design, just like George Nakashima had in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
“Your counters and tables are beautiful, Liam,” Meena says, touching the back of his neck after he shares the idea with her. “But I can’t imagine the miracles you’ll work in a proper shop of your own, without some snotty corporate decorator peering over your shoulder.”
Liam adores the uncondescending interest that Meena shows in his carpentry, as though both their vocations are of equal cultural value. To his surprise, she views her own musicianship as a kind of hard labour, submitting herself to a grim practice regimen that trumps all else, including spending time with him. And as a result, Liam already hungers to spend every waking minute that he isn’t working in her company.
After six months, Meena’s New York engagement ends and she gives up her apartment in preparation for her return to Los Angeles. Because Liam still lives in a tiny room above an auto shop in Crown Heights, he can’t possibly host her while she’s in town, so he withdraws his entire savings to put down on a semi-detached house on the “up-and-coming” edge of Fort Greene. Thankfully, Meena appreciates the boldness of the gesture, and promises to divide her time between L.A. and New York.
Yet her obligations prevent her from visiting as often as planned, and half-time quickly turns into quarter-time. While Liam knows he’s possibly being insecure, he grows convinced that because she’s so accustomed to fine hotels and opulent concert halls, his house displeases her. So in his off time he strips the walls to their studs and performs a complete renovation, all in meticulously finished old-growth Douglas fir and redwood. The raw materials alone nearly double his debt, and though Meena marvels outwardly at the job, she still doesn’t visit as often as he’d hoped. And when she books a two-month engagement in Prague, Liam trips into a black and airless cavern, and dreams of Oxycontin for the first time in years.
A QUESTION
“DO YOU LOVE the forests more than you love me?”
His mother shifts in the lawn chair she’s pulled from the Westfalia to sit by the ocean, running a hand through her salt-tangled hair. They’ve finally made it to the Oregon coast for his tenth birthday, except the water here is black and freezing and the waves are squat and impossible to surf. Liam has spent the afternoon in a funk, crushing between two rocks the purple mussel shells that he finds on the beach. The cold hasn’t stopped Willow from skinny-dipping all morning, bobbing out there with an armada of bull kelp. He wishes she’d wear the bathing suit he prudishly bought for her with his own money at JC Penney, but she hasn’t even removed the tags.