Then there was the second life of the office, its real life. Thomasson was less and less present anyway, so it was Rausch whose exit they awaited, and sometimes they had to wait for a long time; Rausch, for all his partygoing and press-courting and opining and traveling, was in reality a hard worker, and although he might go out to an event (an opening, a lecture), he might also return, and then things would have to be hastily reassembled, so that the office he walked back into would resemble the office he had left. It was better to wait for the nights he would disappear completely, even if it meant waiting until nine or ten o’clock. They had cultivated Rausch’s assistant, brought her coffees and croissants, and knew they could trust her intelligence on Rausch’s arrivals and departures.
But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music was turned on (they rotated among the fifteen of them who got to choose), and takeout menus materialized, and on everyone’s computers, work for Ratstar Architects was sucked back into digital folders, put to sleep, unloved and forgotten, for the night. They allowed themselves an hour of waste, of impersonating Rausch’s weird Teutonic boom (some of them thought he was secretly from Paramus and had adopted the name—Joop Rausch, how could it not be fake?—and the extravagant accent to obscure the fact that he was boring and from Jersey and his name was probably Jesse Rosenberg), of imitating Thomasson’s scowl and way of marching up and down the length of the office when he wanted to perform for company, barking at no one in particular (them, they supposed), “It’s ze vurk, gentlemen! It’s ze vurk!” They made fun of the firm’s most senior principal, Dominick Cheung, who was talented but who was becoming bitter (it was clear to everyone but him that he would never be made a partner, no matter how often Rausch and Thomasson promised him), and even of the projects they worked on: the unrealized neo-Coptic church wrought from travertine in Cappadocia; the house with no visible framework in Karuizawa that now wept rust down its faceless glass surfaces; the museum of food in Seville that was meant to win an award but didn’t; the museum of dolls in Santa Catarina that never should’ve won an award but did. They made fun of the schools they’d gone to—MIT, Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia, Harvard—and how although they’d of course been warned that their lives would be misery for years, how they had all of them, to a one, assumed they’d be the exception (and now all, to a one, secretly thought they still would be). They made fun of how little money they made, how they were twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-two, and still lived with their parents, a roommate, a girlfriend in banking, a boyfriend in publishing (a sad thing, when you had to sponge off of your boyfriend in publishing because he made more than you). They bragged of what they would be doing if they hadn’t gone into this wretched industry: they’d be a curator (possibly the one job where you’d make even less than you did now), a sommelier (well, make that two jobs), a gallery owner (make it three), a writer (all right, four—clearly, none of them were equipped to make money, ever, in any imagining). They fought about buildings they loved and buildings they hated. They debated a photography show at this gallery, a video art show at another. They shouted back and forth at one another about critics, and restaurants, and philosophies, and materials. They commiserated with one another about peers who had become successes, and gloated over peers who had quit the business entirely, who had become llama farmers in Mendoza, social workers in Ann Arbor, math teachers in Chengdu.
During the day, they played at being architects. Every now and then a client, his gaze helicoptering slowly around the room, would stop on one of them, usually either Margaret or Eduard, who were the best-looking among them, and Rausch, who was unusually attuned to shifts in attention away from himself, would call the singled-out over, as if beckoning a child to the adults’ dinner party. “Ah, yes, this is Margaret,” he’d say, as the client looked at her appraisingly, much as he had minutes before been looking at Rausch’s blueprints (blueprints finished in fact by Margaret). “She’ll be running me out of town someday soon, I’m sure.” And then he’d laugh his sad, contrived, walrus-bark laugh: “Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Margaret would smile and say hello, and roll her eyes at them the moment she turned around. But they knew she was thinking what they were all thinking: Fuck you, Rausch. And: When? When will I replace you? When will it be my turn?
In the meantime, all they had was play: after the debating and the shouting and the eating, there was silence, and the office filled with the hollow tappings of mice being clicked and personal work being dragged from folders and opened, and the grainy sound of pencils being dragged across paper. Although they all worked at the same time, using the same company resources, no one ever asked to see anyone else’s work; it was as if they had collectively decided to pretend it didn’t exist. So you worked, drawing dream structures and bending parabolas into dream shapes, until midnight, and then you left, always with the same stupid joke: “See you in ten hours.” Or nine, or eight, if you were really lucky, if you were really getting a lot done that night.
Tonight was one of the nights Malcolm left alone, and early. Even if he walked out with someone else, he was never able to take the train with them; they all lived downtown or in Brooklyn, and he lived uptown. The benefit to walking out alone was that no one would witness him catching a cab. He wasn’t the only person in the office with rich parents—Katharine’s parents were rich as well, as, he was pretty sure, were Margaret’s and Frederick’s—but he lived with his rich parents, and the others didn’t.