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Page 2.
Chapter 2.
 Early on Monday morning, Dr. Jeff Maxxon drove in from the suburbs to his new job as a publisher's editor in Raritania City. The drive took him along a shrub-lined 1930s parkway into a long tunnel whose tiled insides gleamed with yellowish light. Over the tunnel mouth at each end loomed a big Art Deco clock. Under each clock, written blue on white in tiles, was the legend Raritania City Tunnel. The tunnel spilled its traffic into city streets at once modern yet haunted by a past tingling with syncopated jazz rhythms.
Jeff had just put behind him the last divorce details of a troubled marriage, some issues with the federal tax people that had all but cost him his ancestral home in Connecticut, and a car crash that had left him in a hospital for three months. With his arrival in Raritania City a week earlier, he was determined to make a new go of things.
Raritania City seemed, to Jeff's appreciative eyes, a city of clock towers. The night rain had let up, and tires sounded tacky on wet streets. Street lights glowed like golden bowls. The speeding VW's headlights threw spatters of light among whirling leaves.
Beside Jeff lay the Art Deco book he'd stayed up past midnight browsing. Along with Art Deco in the 1920's and '30's had come a craze that seemed it would never go away: streamlining, the first hint of the space age, the signature of what this book called The Age of Speed. Well, Turner had done it over a half century earlier in Britain with impressionistic paintings, the most famous of which, appropriately named 'Speed,' being of an express train moving like a cloaked comet through night and fog. But the Americans had absorbed streamlining into their national purpose. Everything that had until now been ornate and had square corners and looked monumental like an ancient temple, now grew wings and swept-back surfaces. Everything, from toasters to trains, from radios to baby buggies, not to mention cars and planes, suddenly looked, even when standing still, as if it were moving at great speed. This would still be true thirty years and one world war later, in the 1950's, when cars sprouted spaceship-like wings and jet airplanes got swept-back wings. It would still be true in a tight turn of the new millennium, as Jeff raced in his aerodynamic beetle toward his new job.
He yawned and ran his fingers through his tousled hair. Could have used an extra hour of sleep, he thought, eyeing indigo streaks of daylight that marbled the night clouds. Though he was confident his new job would work out, he had reservations about his new employer, a gruff old billionaire, whom he was to meet in person for the first time this morning.
Feeling a mixture of elation with a hint of trepidation, he maneuvered smartly through the pre-rush hour traffic. No matter how wonderfully Raritania City had been imagined, it had one leg in the far future but the other leg in a classical past. The buildings, like the much bigger Chrysler Building and others of its era in New York City, hulked like shadows of their neo-Gothic predecessors. Here too were gargoyles, marble lions, heroic male and female nudes, but all were stylized -- each clearly more an idea than a thing. The streets were clean and neat, but impossibly small. Ornate glass globes, almost Art Nouveau in their prettiness, shed coy light amid obsequious park trees lining the sidewalks as Jeff found a parking spot.
As he stood on the sidewalk, the Aero Atlantic Building towered over him. For a moment he looked upward along its sleek marble sides. He marveled at the concrete sculptures of lions and gargoyles. Warm light filled the lobby like an aquarium, he thought, as he walked up the rain-slicked steps outside. A doorman in rouge uniform and white gloves opened a thick glass door edged in brass.
Jeff stepped from the first gray light of cold dawn back into a set of spaces that still preserved last night. There were few people in the cavernous lobby, which smelled of stale cigar smoke and burnt coffee.
In the near-empty parking lot, he consulted a single sheet of paper that promised: "Introductory Tour of the Aero Atlantic Building for New Employees and Other Interested Parties. Enjoy breakfast, followed by a twenty minute tour of the interiors of this magnificent 1936 building, culminating in a visit to the majestic interior of the clock works on the fiftieth floor."
Minutes later, Jeff joined a group of fifteen or so men and women in the still partially dark cafeteria filled with aromas of fresh coffee, bacon, toast, and eggs. You took a tray and helped yourself. Jeff went easy on the eggs, but sneaked an extra slices of bacon. The coffee was black and pungent.
The new employees of various firms in the Aero Atlantic Building sat at a corner table framed by wall reliefs (streamlined 1930's cars, planes, trains, and ships echoing a new taste for speed and modernity). They were a mixed group, dressed up for the first day on the job and looking their best.
"Good morning," a cheerful fortyish woman in gray business suit and blonde business hair offered from the head of the table. "Welcome to our weekly tour. I'm Mrs. Lippert. I'll be your host for the next hour. I'll just give you a few facts, and then I'll let you eat in peace. After that, we will begin our tour of the Aero Atlantic Building. I wish you good luck in your new jobs. As you may know, Raritania rose from the New York State wilderness during the 1930's as a combined effort of government and business to alleviate the terrible Depression. Almost overnight, streets were laid out, and entire city blocks were built up. Today, Raritania has all the modern urban problems, including drugs, slums, and so on, but underneath the modern reality is an unmistakable flavor that recalls the Moderne Period with its neo-Egyptian and modern touches, its emphasis on sumptuous materials and pleasing functional lines, and most of all its built-in hopefulness for a kind of streamlined science-fiction future. If you are new to Raritania City, this building will give you a good introduction to its best features."
Jeff was just sipping some orange juice when he noticed the young woman opposite. She was trying unobtrusively to read the upside down title of the book on top of his computer, the book he'd stayed up late reading, An Art Deco Sampler.
As he stared at her, aware for the first time of her fresh good looks and well-bred reserve, she looked up. He felt a warm tingle throughout his body; at the same time he noticed the engagement ring on her hand. For a moment, he stared into the depths of those cadmium irises, and perceived there a soul at once shining and buoyant, yet somehow faintly sad. For that moment, he perceived her bewildering series of emotions: first, her naked startlement at being caught looking; second, a closing of the pupils as a blush exploded on her cheekbones; third, an unspoken admission of interest.
He pushed the book across the table. "Have a look," he said, "I spent half the night reading it."
She managed a laugh. "Thanks." She was really quite attractive, with long dark hair, blue eyes, wide creamy cheekbones, sweetly wry mouth, and strong chin. She swung the book around and leafed through it.
"Let's finish up," the tour guide said. "We have to get moving."
The group trudged along endless corridors of indirect lighting. There were mahogany walls carved with neo-Egyptian scenes, weddings of mysticism and progress. Other walls were WPA celebrations of muscular men and women holding wrenches and babies.
"The Aero Atlantic Building," the tour guide said, "occupies an entire city block, rising to fifty two stories. Foot per square foot, it contains almost as much floor space as the Empire State Building sixty miles away in New York City. It houses over a hundred businesses, ranging from publishing houses to stock brokerages. The building has been very well maintained, and of course the materials and the construction were of top quality, so as with so much of old Raritania City, the atmosphere of the 1930's seems always a breath away..."
The tour took them through long corridors of echoing tile, along walls inscribed with stylized flowers and other decorations. Time and again, the group stopped while Mrs. Lippert explained about some curving countertop, some ogive wall niche, some leaded glass window. Each time, Jeff found himself in the proximity of this attractive young woman who, alas, appeared to be committed. Nevertheless, he found himself interested enough, and she did not seem to resist his gentle nearness. He wondered what her tinge of sadness was about. He thought about loaning her the book she was so interested in, and almost put the thought aside, for fear of not getting it back. But he ventured: "I take it you will be working here?"
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