Famous Builder (28 page)

He nods vigorously. And then they both roll their eyes, smiling at the gap between who they were then and who they’ve become.

“I mean, those homes were like”—Denise takes a breath, “I don’t know, wrapped Venetian candies.”

“Hollywood soundstages,” the man offers.

“They
fizzed.
And it wasn’t like they flexed their muscles. Not like the trophy homes these days.”

“A little populist glamour.”

A few miles later they pull into Sturbridge Estates, the model homes they’ve decided to check out. Something about what they’re doing feels deliciously subversive, a little dangerous. After all, neither would ever choose to live in a new suburban house. But that doesn’t stop them from wanting to revisit every now and then what captivated their childhood imaginations. How many hundreds of houses did they explore with their parents every Sunday afternoon after church? Impossible to name and number them all, but the ritual is part of who they are. It dyes their blood, indelible as the ink of all those hymns, responsorial psalms, Eucharistic prayers. If it wasn’t its own religion, then it was a coda to the Mass, an extra occasion to exalt. How they walked from room to furnished room, hushed and holy, as if they were already passing into the next world, the better one to come.

But time has worked its changes on them in ways that are deeper than they can articulate. Today they’re trying on who they might have become had sex, art, books, and years of school not complicated things.

“This is it?” says the man. “Whatever happened to five furnished model homes?”

They stare out at a 5,000-square-foot château with a stucco veneer and plastic punch-in window dividers.

“I guess this is the one we get to see,” says Denise.

They get out of the car and stare at the impeccably sodded lawn, shadowed at this hour by the stretched pattern of a weeping willow. The yews glitter in the sprinkler water. There’s only one other car parked in front of Denise’s.

“I don’t know about this,” the man says.

“We’ll just breeze through. We don’t have to stay very long.”

“It looks mean,” says the man. “I think it’s glaring at us.”

“Oh, stop.”

They nudge open the front door. They feel smaller than they’re used to: the foyer is the size of a small ballroom, and the second floor soars thirty, thirty-five feet, bordered by a staircase with a railing of bleached wood. The ceiling above sparkles with granulated spray. Everything smells adhesive. A circular window on the landing overlooks the treetops in the backyard.

The man steadies himself. “Whoa.”

They step lightly in their shoes. Music tinkles through the sound system. The living room, the dining room, the family room: all are so enormous that the furniture looks lost in them. A violet orchid glowers on the coffee table. A boxy sofa hunkers beside the gray wall, trying as hard as it can to command. But it seems to feel as they do. It clears its throat, pats down its sleeves, and wishes it were inside a warmer, more congenial space.

“This is a house for the family who doesn’t want to spend any time together,” the man says.

“This is a house that wants to bully you the minute you step into its mouth,” says Denise.

“But it’s cheaply built,” the man says. “Look.” And he runs his palm over the woodwork, as something catches. He shows his hand to Denise, who scowls at the blond splinter piercing his thumb.

Carefully, they ascend the staircase. No other visitors this afternoon. No salesperson coming forth to welcome them, to shake their hands and pass out a price list. Denise is entirely immersed in the finer facets of the interior (is that because her ex-husband lives in an earlier section of the same development a few streets away?), while the man’s attention has scattered like the flock of sparrows he watches through the circular window. All he wants is a brochure. All he wants are names, maps, renderings: the lyrical essence made concrete. Perhaps that’s all he ever cared about, really, all those years he wanted to be a builder. Names, maps, renderings: loving the particulars of a world inside and out, upside and down, until it made the brain glow.

“Oh, my God,” Denise says. “Look at this bedroom.”

They stand, dazed, inside a chilly white room with clerestory windows. Like the sofa downstairs, the king-sized bed’s dwarfed by the room. The orchids this time are a deep violent yellow with crimson threads. But the enormity of the space strikes him as more severe here: the man feels as if they’re caught inside a chilled glass cathedral, without pews or a congregation, which doesn’t permit anything resembling spontaneity or laughter or a casual human touch.

“Can you imagine someone fucking in here?” the man says.

“Sweetheart,” Denise says, “this house isn’t meant for someone who fucks.”

And when they look up, a colossal salesman with a green golfing cardigan is standing in the doorway.

He doesn’t say hello. Or turn up the corners of his mouth. He holds them entirely in his gaze, making it plain he’s heard everything they’ve said. He knows exactly who they are, not the husband and wife they were sure they’d resembled, but something stranger, impossible to categorize: excommunicants who’ve wandered into the realm of particularly righteous church.

“Beautiful home,” the man says.

“Thank you so very much for your time,” Denise says.

They squeak past him. And they walk down the stairs, first slowly, then a little faster, nearly tripping over their laces before they run, run, run to the car.

***

We’re not talking about the shard of a saint’s bone. No pamphlet of spiritual lessons from the bottom of a well. Just a pen. Not even something handed down to me by some long-dead ancestor I never laid eyes on, but something I picked up in Provincetown on the last days of August when the crowds on the street were thinner and quieter than they’d been, when the light was such a deep, scalding pink over the rooftops that I couldn’t stop from walking into that shop—just as the first stars appeared overhead—to anchor that moment in my memory. It certainly helped that the pen was my favorite color (marine blue) and had the same anodized surface as the aluminum drinking cups of my childhood from which I drank iced tea after spending entire days at the beach. Still, I never thought it had meant so much to me until I’d given it up for lost a few weeks ago, until I’d already decided, with overwhelming reluctance, to forgive the stranger who grasped it between his fingers.

But what’s this? I wave it about like a sparkler. “My pen! My pen!”

Mark crosses our front yard in Houston, a cat carrier in each hand. “Well, look at you.”

“I was reaching inside my jacket pocket. The inside pocket? I can’t believe this. It must have been there the whole time.”

I hold in my sigh. I’m so full, hot, so taut about the face, that I might just roll and blow across the lawn. There I am, rubbing up against the ferns, the live oak, the mottled clay pots of the sago palms. I’m rising, aren’t I? Right through the limbs of the trees. Then …
pop.
Certainly I’m only confirming my tendency toward dramatics. Our elderly cats, Portia and Thisbe, bleat at me from behind the bars of their respective cages.

“Didn’t I tell you you were going to find it?”

“Yeah, but I’m always losing things.”

“And you’re always finding them, too.” He places Portia and Thisbe side by side on the backseat, stops, then looks directly into my face. If there weren’t some glimmers of warmth inside that gaze, if he didn’t so clearly get a kick out of this facet of my personality, even though he pretends he’s had it, I think I’d be inclined to fuss.

But listen: while I admit to losing my wallet at least once every two weeks (a smack to the forehead, “My wallet! My wallet! What have I done with my wallet?”) only to find it next to the bathroom sink or under another pile of laundry, I’ve lost all kinds of things within the last six months. My driver’s license. A tank watch. Several gym locks. My address book with the leather cover—years of collected names left beneath the seat of a rental car in the airport at Portland, Oregon. My weight-lifting gloves—
twice
within the last week. This wouldn’t be such a problem if I didn’t try to be so exacting, if I weren’t always listening for the jingle of my keys in my pocket. Is that my father’s voice I hear, from twenty-seven years back, on a family trip, as my mother and I sort through the trash bin of a Denny’s in San Diego for my clear pink retainer?
Didn’t I tell you not to take it out of your mouth?

I squeeze my pen tighter in my palm.

Here we are, packing up the car in the hopes that we can drive the 2,200 miles—along with our two cats and two large retrievers—back to Provincetown in four days and three nights, so that Mark can get back in time to catch a plane to D.C. the following morning. As we’ve divided our time between at least two places for the last six years, we should be used to these harried feelings, but no. All those books, clothes, papers, objects—perhaps the prospect of carting our home along with us just one more time seems about as daunting as cleaning a cathedral with a toothbrush. Or maybe my mind is so saturated with making mental lists of everything I want beside me that I need a good squeezing out: a sponge that’s scrubbed one too many cups and dishes. How to say yes to one thing, and no to another when confronted with the task of imagining yourself so thoroughly into the daily routines of the future? If I’m not thinking hard enough, I won’t have my camera with me if I need to take a picture of Arden, our copper-black retriever, when he decides to sit on the back deck during a mid-March blizzard, perfectly poised and cheerful, brown eyes shining, flakes sticking to his curly coat like a dog inside a snow dome. Or I won’t have
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
when I need to think about it in relationship to
Hejira.
And what about the green box patterned with the yellow beetles given to me by my brother, Michael? I’ll need it on my desk, surely I will, to remind me that he carried it all the way back from Ocean City for me, when he had ten thousand other things to think of, and a new wife and Jordan, their baby.

Mark walks down the porch steps with one arm behind his back as if he’s hiding something from me.

“What do you have there?”

“Nothing.” He tucks whatever it is beneath his seat and gazes at the neighbor’s ivy. The dogs’ tails thump the back window from inside. “Ready?”

“So you’re doing it, too.”

“What?”

I hold out my palm for the house key.

“Baby.”

“Just one more thing.” Then I walk inside and grab the bottle of seaweed-peony shampoo from the corner of the tub.

***

Mark and I take the bed by the window. Big Beau harbors between us, pink-nosed and golden, white snout resting on splayed paws. Portia wheezes by my feet; Thisbe stares at her face with horror in the full-length mirror, while Arden, it goes without saying, stretches out his legs as far as he can, claiming the opposite bed entirely for himself:
mine.
We’re at a Holiday Inn in Laurel, Mississippi. The food bowls have been filled and emptied, the litter box appropriately moistened, and we’re all lying in our room with its plum carpet, plum bedspreads, and plum lamp shades. We work to keep our minds still, trying not to think of all the churches, billboards, pines, and yellow crosses (always in threes) rushing by. The heater flutters the curtains.
The Sopranos
flickers and fades on the TV screen. Given that we’re five hundred miles from the familiar scents of our rugs and our cushions, we’re all holding up just fine. Arden heaves a huge, stunned, luxuriant sigh.

Headlights glow through the window. Now what: the manager, a squadron of housekeepers? A crowd marching up the hill with nooses, torches? “And you said it was one miniature pinscher,” the desk clerk cries, jerking the curtains aside.
“Homo!”
But it’s only the man next door. I get up and decide to check out the flat wrapped soaps, and wonder if I should just stash them in my bag.

At the mirror, I stare at my eyes, corners creased from looking ahead. Seventeen hundred miles away, the streets are still sandy from the spreaders, the SEE YOU NEXT SPRING signs curling in the shop windows. Mid-February, after all. Could the house remember us? Old, dear house: steep roof, waxy, resinous smell, thick with the lives of all the generations who’ve lived and died inside its rooms these last two hundred years. It couldn’t be further from the house of my childhood, strong with its scents of fresh paint and adhesive, no nicks or scratches on
that
woodwork, a house in which we did our best to fill up that newness with talk, arguments, music, living with the now-touching conviction that the view outside the window (see that swing set with the forest green seat? the cluster of cherry trees by the dog house?) couldn’t be anyone’s but ours forever. So much longing inside those walls: Bobby sanding the finish off a battered Ib Koford-Larsen chair he’d found along the street, Michael playing a six-measure passage from “Carmina Burana” over and over on his oboe. There’s my father working out an especially recalcitrant equation at the table, my mother pulling in her lip, threading a sewing needle just inches in front of her face. (And outside, though never very far away, Mrs. Fox leading a hushed tour past her front-loading washer; Dolores Dasher watching the blinking red light atop her flagpole; Bill Levitt talking up his next new city; Joni Mitchell; India Wills; Amy Goldfin; Aunt Goldie; Lisa Marx; Kate Papagallo; the Cher of Salt Lake; Laura Nyro; Billy; Beethoven.…) Who would have thought that we’d all leave for different parts of the country and become the kind of family who’d make dutiful phone calls to one another on the occasional Saturday? No wonder my mother had that lump in her throat when, one morning, during the week of her moving, she saw her mother’s old upright—the very piano on which I’d practiced for so many years—carted away to the church on that flatbed truck.