Building a Home with My Husband (2 page)

I’m not thinking of alarms as I race toward my connecting flight. I’m only congratulating myself on how much lighter my carry-on is than usual. For the past year, I’ve lugged my laptop on my trips, only to find that it grew heavier with each airport. This time I finally left it home.

Even so, I’m sweating when I take my seat. My layover required a breathless dash across Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, and now, overhead bins slamming shut above me, I have only a few minutes to check my voice mail. There’s one message. Expecting nothing important, I shuck off my coat while I press the code to listen. “It’s me,” Hal says, his voice serious. He never sounds like this, and I freeze as he continues: “Call me as soon as you get this.” The message ends so quickly, it barely seems to exist.

I dial him with shaking hands. It’s already nighttime back in Delaware—anything could have happened. Has someone I love been in a car accident? Had a heart attack? Please, not my sister Beth. Not my father. Friends. Even my mother. Please, please, please—it can’t be Hal.

Immediately upon answering, Hal says, “Did you take your laptop to San Diego?”

My confusion at his question overwhelms my relief that he’s alive. “What?”

“Your laptop. Where is it?”

“In my study at home.”

“No it’s not.” He sighs, and explains what happened. “I’m sorry, Baboo,” he says.

I try to speak, but the shake that was in my hands is radiating through my body. Though hardly as catastrophic as a flatlining monitor in an intensive care unit, losing a laptop means losing everything I’ve done for months. I do have copies of my recent writing, but when I backed up last week, I once again neglected my address book. I add names so often that I keep postponing this chore.

My hand reflexively covers my mouth. How could I have been so reckless? I, of all people, who measure my wealth by those I care about and those who care about me? Who, having endured a supernova of a childhood, grieves every loss, and has pursued the most impossible revivals? Yet my procrastination has lost me enough people to fill ten airplanes, and unlike Hal, and Beth, and my mother—each gone from my life for many years, then returned—I’ll never get those lost friends back.

“Rae?” Hal says.

“What did the police say?” I croak.

“They didn’t get any fingerprints.”

“So that’s it?”

“They said they’d investigate. But I think we can kiss that laptop good-bye.”

Now we both sigh, and, again, I can’t find words. But this time it’s for a reason other than shock, and Hal knows exactly what it is. No two people can live entwined for years and not come to read whole Rosetta stones in the silences, glances, and head tilts that outsiders wouldn’t even register. Hal and I generally delight in this phenomenon, and have even jokingly given it names—Friendship Wi-Fi, The Collective Consciousness of Kin, Marriage Mind Meld. But neither of us is amused now. Our relationship clairvoyance has moved on from the burglary to our one huge problem. A seventeen hundred square foot problem that isn’t going away.

Finally Hal says, “I’m going out tonight to get a replacement for the basement door. It’ll be secure by the time you get home.”

“Thanks. But—” Don’t say it, I tell myself, as the flight attendants check that the passengers’ seat belts are buckled. Hold your tongue. But the shake in my body is now coursing so mightily in the opposite direction that my mouth just won’t stop. “I mean, there are so many other things I haven’t liked,” I say. “Now I won’t even feel safe in that house.”

Then I lock my lips, and without a word we go through it all over again. The house. The one quarrel we’ve had since he carried me over its threshold. It’s ironic, because the house—or, really, any house—is such an unlikely dispute for us. When we met, I was twenty-three, he thirty, and neither of us thought about owning a house. An aspiring writer with low-paying jobs that meant little to me, I was content scribbling stories in libraries. Hal, in the apprenticeship of his architectural career, and at his own low-paying jobs, spent his off-hours at home practicing guitar. Home ownership was as absurd as time travel—and not only because of our callings or income.

The truth was that I couldn’t commit to him. I loved him, he loved me, we were utterly compatible, but something I had yet to understand kept me from saying that he was The One. Nonetheless, we so enjoyed being together that after a year of spending every night in his or my dumpy Philadelphia apartment, we moved into our own dumpy Philadelphia apartment together. Five years later, after savoring everything from our vegetarianism to our fondness for offbeat films and modern art, we rented a modest house in the suburbs. But I felt no closer to what I wanted to feel. I groped toward advice, but each friend contradicted the last, and therapists mostly said, “Tell me more about your family.” Hal grew aloof, sometimes patronizing; I burrowed into writing and friends. Eventually the highlight of our time together was zoning out before the TV, numbing ourselves with pizza. When I was alone, thoughts assaulted me:
I have to leave! But he’s so funny and caring and smart. I have to find The One! But how can I hurt him?
My head felt caught between two crashing cymbals. I developed rashes. I ground my teeth in my sleep. And finally, after thirteen years—I know,
thirteen years—
we called it quits. For the next six years, I lived in rented rooms, over garages, in basements. I dated a little, but mostly I was alone. Hal was so convinced he’d failed at love that he didn’t even try to date. He took up Buddhism and environmental sustainability and eventually became a first-time homeowner—of the very house we’re not talking about now.

He says, “We’ll deal with the house when you get back.”

“Right,” I say, as my brain sends him an instant message:
This is the final strike.

“We’ll work it out.”

“I know.”
The time to move has come.

“Turn off all electronic devices,” I hear overhead.

I don’t want to end our call like this: stunned about the burglary, agitated about the loss, angry about the house, longing to comfort each other. In the moment we have left, Hal and I hold each other’s gaze through the phone. “Love you,” he whispers. “Me, too,” I say. And, remembering how much easier it is for him to say those words—and how accepting he is of why I find love so hard to express—I feel tears come. That’s when we hang up.

Then the plane is accelerating down the runway, and I suddenly realize that this moment has launched me into a new leg of my life’s journey. I don’t want it to. I don’t want to have anything to do with whatever awaits: expenditures of time and money to replace the laptop, the return of our debate about moving, and, heaven help us, if we decide to stay and finally renovate, possibly even our hard-won solidarity going up in smoke. I cannot guess that in the end all this will indeed happen, and some of it will be a great trial, though not in any of the ways that I fear, and not only with him. In fact, it will blow open the tight seal around everything I think I know about myself, about family, about the misunderstandings and resilience of love; and all my memories and aspirations and regrets and joys will come bursting out, some old beliefs disintegrating, others surviving transformed. But it’s only a house, people will tell me, and, with Hal demystifying for me how construction proceeds, step by step, I will not refute that it is. Yet the lessons I get in the physical world of building will, at the same time, deliver so much more: locked rooms leading to the depths of myself, forgotten closets brimming with wrinkled relationships, falling walls exposing conflicts of the past, sudden calamities enlightening my spirit, newborn windows opening their eyes and looking out into the future.

But of course I do not know any of this as the plane tilts up into the sky. I simply feel stiff with anxiety, and envision quarrels stirring beyond the horizon. How different I might feel if I could see past the dust, and glimpse the gems that this journey will reveal.

 

Two days later, I drive home from the airport, determined to press my case to move.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate Hal’s affection for the house. That’s been clear to me since we reconnected after the breakup. I think about that time now, as I grip the steering wheel, dreading the dispute that awaits. Soon after Hal bought the house, we reestablished a friendship, one that neither of us thought would blossom into a romance. For a while after that we visited through casual phone calls and the occasional meal out, and that’s where I expected things to stay. But then Hal began waging a gentle campaign to win me over.

First he invited me to the wedding of a friend, where I was reminded of traits I’d forgotten, such as Hal’s sense of humor and easy affection toward his friends. Then our calls began growing longer and more frequent, often occurring while we lay in our separate beds in our separate homes, late into a weekend morning. Our dinners out became more relaxed, too, and went from monthly to weekly to twice a week. Slowly I saw that I was no longer focusing on all that he was not, but was letting myself see what he actually was: a man with a rare combination of dependability and playfulness, likeability and intelligence, humility and confidence, vulnerability and strength. Still, I didn’t think that anything more would happen until he invited me along on a business trip and suggested we share a room—“as friends,” he clarified when I asked. Yet it was there, in a nondescript hotel along a highway in Pennsylvania, that our friendship turned into romance, and by the time the weekend was over, I realized that he was a man cuter than I’d ever acknowledged, with angular cheekbones and hazel-green eyes and hair so fine that the gray he’d acquired now simply shimmered in the blond. Such a contrast to me, with my dark curls and brown eyes. Yet we were both slim and short-statured, and we both smiled easily, he playing the court jester, me laughing merrily at his silliness. We do fit, I thought, numb with amazement. After nineteen years, we actually fit.

A few days after our transformation in the hotel, he invited me to dinner at his house. I’d been there a few times before, but this time, I realized, I’d be seeing it with different eyes, just as I was now seeing him.

On the appointed day I drove from my apartment in Pennsylvania to Wilmington, Delaware. There, after turning off the main road into a grid of one-way streets, I made my way down a slope of hundred-year-old row houses, which were sandwiched between the downtown office towers at the hill’s peak and a genteel park at the hill’s bottom. Although the neighborhood bumped up against a major hospital and was close to an interstate, when I parked I enjoyed an uncommon quiet, one I hadn’t noticed before.

Hal ran down the street from his house and hugged me hello. Then we proceeded to walk down his block, a tucked-away haven one lane wide and one block long. I was struck, as I’d previously been, by the majestic sycamores, then by the surreal way that several of the trees displayed the remnants of NO PARKING ANYTIME signs—rectangles of metal that had been affixed to the trunks so long ago, the bark had grown over all four edges, swallowing most of the words, leaving nothing but TIME on one sign, the biblical fragment ARK on another. I laughed at how appropriately symbolic the signs were for us, and Hal said they were one of several things he loved about living here. There was also the sociable atmosphere in the neighborhood, which I witnessed moments later, when he exchanged warm words with a little boy and his mother who were sitting on a porch across the street from Hal’s house. Hal reminded me also that the block was informally known as Teacher’s Lane, because once upon a time it lodged several prominent educators, one of whom, Eldridge Waters, had sold Hal his house. Then Hal and I turned toward his house. He ushered me up the steps, we crossed the terra-cotta porch, he opened the heavy oak door, and we were in.

Instantly, the pleasure he took in the hardwood floors, deep baseboards, plaster walls, and operating transoms—and the promise he saw in the rundown kitchen and bathroom, the cramped bedrooms, the paucity of closets, even the miniscule backyard—endeared him to me even more. I already knew what everything looked like, yet now every detail seemed important and interesting. I felt different, too: as we emerged from the stairs into his third-floor music studio, where sycamore leaves were draping one set of windows and sunlight was streaming through the other, and he tentatively reached out to hold my hand, it seemed as if we were in a glass ship sailing down a river of row houses and trees, embarking on a voyage that transcended our failed past. As we stood with the sun pouring in from the south, it occurred to me that if this man could see so much that was worthy in such an unexceptional dwelling—and make me see it, too—then his heart was more generous than I’d realized. If, with all of its imperfections, he could say, “I love this and want to stay forever,” he could say the same to me. A few months later, he did.

But soon after we walked home from the justice of the peace, I learned that the third floor was also bone-chilling in winter and suffocating in summer. It lacked insulation, as did the entire house, which also sported no central air. The kitchen cabinets were laminated with a sticky veneer that no amount of scrubbing would clean. The kitchen window looked out to a decrepit aluminum porch. The bathroom was tiled in bumblebee black and yellow, its pipes clogging so frequently we had them replaced, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling below. Without funds to repair the hole, we then had a porthole between the bathroom and the dining room. It leaked, too: when we showered, water dripped onto the first floor. Electrical outlets were meager in number, and the wiring was knob and tube. The furnace was old, the stove ancient, the windows with aged, wavy panes failed to stop drafts. Transom glass was missing. Hardwood floors bore the blemishes of decades of rotting carpets. The banister was an ugly metal railing. In heavy rain, puddles speckled the basement.

I tactfully admitted to Hal that I lacked his enthusiasm for the house. But I hardly commanded the resources to move to a place more to my liking, like a sunny, ample-sized, detached house, preferably in a suburb with generous yards and garages. You mean, Hal would respond, a place with the kind of muscular mortgage that would kick sand in the face of our scrawny payments? He’d go on. Small, attached houses are more energy-efficient, we can walk to do most errands, and we enjoy long strolls along the Brandywine Creek in the park. I still protested. “Okay, then,” he’d say, “where and what would your dream house be?”