Protagonist · The Distant Husband
A designer in Caldwell who builds walls the way a furnace builds heat, automatically, structurally, because that is what he was built to do. On Sunday mornings he draws his second wife in a notebook she does not know about, because the pen is the intermediary and the intermediary is the distance.
James Ota, 42, is a designer, half-Japanese, half-Irish, raised in the north side of Caldwell between two architectures: his mother Yuko, contained and precise, who raked the gravel path in the pattern that was the pattern, and his father Sean, who left on a Tuesday after dinner when James was eleven, the way he entered and exited every room, abruptly, without apology. James grew up to design the distance, the wall he builds to regulate closeness, the studio with a door he needs in every space he occupies.
His first marriage, to Allison Park, a Caldwell Elementary teacher, ended when he left her for Nina Chen, an architect at Brandt Architecture; their daughter Lily, seven, carries an overnight bag between two houses and composes her face the way she learned from watching her father. His therapist, Dr. Patricia Kemp, named the thing in fourteen months of sessions: you don’t have an affair problem, James, you have an intimacy ceiling. You get close to people and then you build a wall to regulate the closeness. The book opens as he is about to marry Nina, drawing her on Sunday mornings in a Moleskine she does not know is full of her, the drawing the closest he allows himself to come.
At the florist, picking up Nina’s wedding roses, a woman with still hands reads James the brief of the marriage in his own register, brief, deliverables, composition, the load-bearing and the decorative, the wall. The one impossible specific: the Sunday-morning notebook, the pen on the heavy paper, the composition Nina does not know she is. She leaves a single white rose with a brown arc at the lip of one petal, the flaw a client would ask to replace; James does not, and presses it into the back of the notebook. (The verbatim brief is on the book’s page.)
He marries Nina anyway, and builds the wall anyway, because being in the room is a thing he would have to do and the wall is the thing he is. The work becomes the room; the studio hours that are chosen, not required, become the withdrawal; the question changes tense from where were you to where are you; the cancelled therapy session is the exit he cannot call an exit. Nina leaves a note on the counter in the architect’s precise hand, what he is is just stronger than what he wants to be. The book ends on a Sunday with the empty made side of the bed, the dog Miso on the floor, the Chemex washed clean, and a blank page James holds the pen over and does not yet draw. Dr. Kemp’s sentence: That’s where we start.
One of the series’ books set in the valley city of Caldwell. James’s wall-building rhymes with the distance-building men across the books, The Good Father, The Quiet Man, The Distant Man, a careful man who calls the distance work, and with the drafting-table world of The Design Partner.