The Objects of Her Affection (5 page)

Sophie and Brian moved quickly—racing between the apartment and house in a borrowed truck while a babysitter watched the kids—and unpacked slowly, at night, after the kids were in bed. This was Sophie’s favorite part: finding a satisfying spot for every lamp and picture frame, filling the living room’s built-in bookshelves, nudging furniture this way and that, arranging, organizing, claiming every corner and cabinet. She sank fully into the house’s embrace, the way she had once melted into Brian, back when they were young and well rested. At night she dreamed that the house was alive, its furnace whooshing blood through its veins, radiators sighing and moaning, the smooth plaster walls warming to her touch.

She knew it was crazy to be in love with a house, but that was exactly how it felt—the dazed disbelief slowly blossoming into cautious joy. The obsessive circling of the mind back to the object of its fascination, again and again, accompanied by a private, shuddering jolt of adrenaline. How could she explain it? It was exactly how she’d felt when she and Brian had first started dating seriously, when she finally let herself stay the night, when she finally shed her casual, playing-the-field bravado and submitted to another person’s caring attentions in a way that felt simultaneously alien and normal. Brian was her first; she’d never even known what it meant—“falling in love”—until she found herself plummeting into that vacuum of utter vulnerability. And then, before long, the falling had turned into floating, and over the years it had eased into a gentle sway, holding her like a hammock, exactly the way she liked to be held, yielding yet secure, not too tight, not too loose.

So here she was again, letting herself fall in love—that strange, plunging feeling—only this time it was with a house, and it wasn’t scary, because while people could abandon or hurt her, a house, she was pretty sure, could not.

2006

Wherever there were children, there were Music for Me franchises, so naturally there was one right around the corner from the new house. Sophie took the kids to Music for Me twice a week—an experience that, on the spectrum of parental obligations, fell somewhere between the three a.m. feeding and the episiotomy. The parents (mostly mothers, with one or two bearded stay-at-home dads thrown into the mix) would sit in a circle on the floor, singing songs, clapping hands, and shaking maracas with strenuous glee while the babies dozed and the toddlers wandered off to investigate the room’s light switches and door hinges. The teacher, a deeply dimpled young woman in a bright yellow vest with a ponytail on the very top of her head, sang everything. “Registration is now open for the next session,” she would croon. “We take MasterCard and Visa, fa la la.” Sophie couldn’t look at her while she was doing this; it was too embarrassing.

Sophie spent the majority of the classes in a state of acute discomfort, counting the minutes until the ordeal would end. But Lucy seemed to like it, and sometimes Elliot waved his fists in a way that looked vaguely rhythmic, so Sophie continued taking them, knowing how important music was to their developing brains, and wishing someone had done the same for her so that she wouldn’t have so much trouble hitting the notes in “Good Morning, Farmer George.”

It also turned out to be a good way to meet other parents in the neighborhood. She met Amy there, and her melancholy daughter, Mathilda, who would follow Lucy around with a look of wonderment on her face. Amy was a social worker embroiled in local politics, and her husband, Keith, was an architect who dressed the part, from his old-school Pumas to his black-framed, ostentatiously nerdy glasses. They invited Sophie and Brian to dinners with other families in the neighborhood, and introduced them to a new way of socializing: the noisy playdate with cocktails, plain pasta at the kids’ table, braised lamb shanks for the adults, gossip continually interrupted by shrieks, demands, and tantrums. Eventually somebody would put on a DVD in the playroom, and the kids would get quiet while the adults, moving on to dessert wine, got louder.

Brian was the star of these dinners, with his tales of auctions and collectors, of treasures found in attics and fakes found in museums. Their new friends pressed him for details about the millionaires on his committee, basking in the borrowed glow of the cable magnate, the football team owner’s wife, the newspaper scion. Sophie appreciated those stories as social capital, but she knew they had nothing to do with Brian’s actual work—what pulled him to his office early each morning, what made him forget to eat lunch or return Sophie’s calls. It was the objects: the glaze, luster, relief, and reserve…it was the masterful brushstrokes consigned to brittle time capsules, which managed, through some miracle, to stay intact through wars and fires and ocean crossings. Brian was helplessly, embarrassingly in love with ceramics. He didn’t bring that up at parties.

People didn’t understand Sophie’s work, mistaking her for a web designer and running out of questions once she explained that she worked strictly on the back end. She didn’t mind; she had no interest in talking about her job outside her circle of colleagues. There was too much explaining, too much baffled admiration. Brian’s job was firmly rooted in the material world, but her work had no shadow, no heft, and she found she could make a conversation evaporate with the mere mention of ASP.NET data binding or dynamic validation controls.

Besides, thinking about her work had begun to produce small twists of anxiety in her stomach. Things were not picking up the way they were supposed to. Sophie had long learned not to try to see around corners; the trick to the freelance life was to accept the inscrutability of the future and wait patiently for the job that would, inevitably, come along. But she’d only had a few small jobs since the summer, and it was becoming increasingly clear that during her brief maternity leave, most of her clients had managed to forget about her.

So while Lucy was in preschool and Elliot napped, Sophie filled her time reading web dev blogs and emailing friends in the business. She called her old clients, letting them know she had “bandwidth,” even though she knew somehow that this would make things worse. Clients wanted the busy freelancers, the ones who took too long to call them back, the ones who negotiated with aloofness. She’d been one of the busy ones, before having children, and had seen how busyness always spiraled into hecticness. Now she saw that it worked the other way as well. Slowness spiraled into nothingness. It was hard not to feel like the lonely girl on the edge of the dance floor; she knew she shouldn’t take it personally. It was just a matter of learning the latest software, getting to know the new project managers, letting her old friends know she was working again. It would happen eventually.

In the meantime, thanks to all the renovations and their attendant surprises (bad wiring, corroded plumbing), she’d had to perform some financial sleight of hand to get through the month: shifting balls in and out of cups. Send a payment to the plumber, put the cable bill on a credit card, make the minimum mortgage payment, write the babysitter a bad check for now, make up for it with cash the next week. She didn’t say anything to Brian, not wanting to worry him; she knew it was a temporary situation. She also wanted to avoid giving him the opportunity to complain about the house.

To make things worse, Elliot had begun climbing out of his crib and scaling the changing table, bookshelves, and dresser, requiring Sophie to come downstairs several times a night to put him back to bed—silently, with no eye contact or cuddling, as directed by the child-rearing experts. As if cuddling were actually a temptation, after being yanked awake at the hard-won, blissful moment sleep arrived. Exhaustion and anxiety sharpened the edges of Sophie’s mind, the way it had in the first sour-milk-scented weeks of her children’s lives. She felt like she’d been scrubbed all over with steel wool. Lights were too bright, voices were too loud, the clutter of toys and shoes all over the house was a personal affront. Details slipped out of her mental grasp, and making any sort of decision, whether she was choosing pizza toppings or health insurance, left her quivering with confusion. Her voice took on a sharp edge that made the children wary. Brian kept his distance.

One airless June night, after several rounds of returning Elliot to his crib, Sophie retreated to her office to wait for his next foray. She turned on her desk lamp, and a moth fluttered into the room; they still hadn’t ordered screens for the third floor windows. She picked up a stack of envelopes and started sorting them into piles: bills…credit card statements…credit card offers worth considering…refinance offers…junk mail….

She came to an envelope that read: “An important message about your mortgage.” Again? How many times could one mortgage change hands? She neatly sliced the top edge with her letter opener and scanned the dense type: “…to inform you…adjustable rate mortgage…London Interbank Offering Rate plus margin…” She shook her head. At the bottom, a box that said “Your new minimum payment, as of August 1, 2006” was set apart from the rest of the text. Was this some kind of offer? If so, it was laughable. The new payment was double what she was currently paying.

She set it aside, not sure what pile to put it in, and turned to the credit card statements. Scanning the charges, she was amazed by how many times she bought diapers at the corner market, where they were twice as expensive as anywhere else. She needed to get a membership at one of those bulk stores.

She returned the statements to their pile and picked the mortgage letter back up. It didn’t look like an offer. She tried to decipher the words. It was definitely from her mortgage company, MortgageOne, and it was specific to her loan: there was her account number. She found the words “your new interest rate” buried in the final paragraph. She couldn’t remember exactly what the original rate had been, something with two or three digits after the decimal point, but she was sure it was much lower than this one.

All right, so their interest rate had gone up. It seemed crazy that it had happened so fast; hadn’t Ron told her it was good for a few years? Or was that something else? She fanned herself with the envelope, blinking away her exhaustion. It was so hard to remember what had happened in that cubelike, acoustic-tiled room so long ago. She recalled bouncing Elliot in her arms until her shoulders ached, but that was about it.

She squared the edges of the piles of envelopes, arranging them in a symmetrical pattern on her desk. Clearly, she couldn’t make the new payment. It was absurdly high—and with virtually no warning! But wasn’t there always room for negotiation? She’d been scrupulous about making payments on time, which should count for something. She pulled a colorful envelope out of the recycling bin: “REFINANCE TODAY!” Of course—that’s what you do. She vaguely remembered hearing Ron tell her this. She looked at her watch. Five fifteen. She could call him in four hours.

***

“Well, hey, Sophie! Of course I remember you. How are those kids?” Ron’s voice had the same cheesy-but-reassuringly-bouncy quality Sophie remembered. She explained the letter, the new payment.

“Yep,” he said. “Well, as you probably remember, we went for the one-year ARM, ’cause you were looking for a lower payment at the time, while you got your business going again. And I got you that awesome promotional rate at the time…I do remember that.”

“Okay, but this is ridiculous. We can’t pay this. We need to refinance.”

“I hear ya. I hear ya. You did an option ARM, right?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been paying the whole enchilada every month?”

“Well, the minimum. It’s all I can do right now. I haven’t missed any.”

“You did some work on the house, right? Any new bathrooms? Add any square footage? Deck?”

“We did a lot. Took care of the lead paint, fixed some walls, did the roof. Finished the floors. Electrical stuff.”

“’Kay. ’Kay. Tell you what. Why don’t you call the lender, explain your situation, see if you can put your heads together and craft some kind of solution.”

“Craft—but can’t you help us refinance?”

Ron coughed. “That’s not gonna be an option for you. Look, I don’t have access to your account, but it sounds like you’ve been tacking interest onto your balance this whole time. Your home’s worth less than a year ago, your balance is higher; you’re in, you know, you’re in a tough spot. It sounds to me like you might be underwater.”

“What?!” Sophie cried, her sluggish thoughts flailing. “Our house is not worth less. We put every penny of our savings into it; we did the electrical, the pipes. You should see the floors! You haven’t seen it, Ron. You don’t have any idea!” Her throat tightened, and tears moved into position.

“Hey—I’m just sayin’,” Ron protested. “The market’s tanking. I’m sure you’ve done amazing work… Just call your loan servicer. I’m only the broker. I want to help you, but I can’t. ’Kay?”

“Okay.” She tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling, noticing a threadlike crack in the plaster.

“It’ll work out. Call your lender, all right?”

“All right. Thanks.”

She was always doing that—thanking people who didn’t deserve her gratitude. It was a dumb habit. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

That night she lay awake for hours, turning the situation over in her bruised mind. She was an idiot, agreeing to those terms. She’d barely skimmed the application before signing it. And this, after promising Brian she could take care of things! Why didn’t she ever learn? She shouldn’t be left to handle important matters on her own.

And the house. The house was supposed to take care of her family, and she had promised to do the same in return. Could it really be taken away from them? The very idea seemed ridiculous. It was a problem of math, a matter of shifting balls in and out of cups a little faster. She’d call the mortgage company tomorrow. There was time. A good two months before the loan reset.

Elliot’s wake-up call came blaring through the baby monitor at five forty-five. Sophie lay in bed waiting for Brian to make the first move, but he stayed asleep, or pretended to, snoring lightly.

***

The object carts were no longer in the hallway when Sophie visited Brian this time. Instead, half of them had been crowded into Brian’s office, where Sophie had to scoot sideways, holding her messenger bag high, to get to the chair beside his desk. “Sorry,” Brian said, moving a pile of reference books to the floor so she could sit down. “I’ve left the art handlers a million voice mails about this, but apparently nobody’s home.”

Sophie looked at the mess surrounding her and wondered what kind of help she was expecting to find here. She felt her resolve slipping, but tightened her grip. The conversation she was here to have—about the bills, the mortgage, the shell game—this was what married people did. They shared their troubles, confessed their mistakes, accepted help when it was offered. This was normal. Nothing to be afraid of. And she knew exactly how Brian would respond—with restraint. He wouldn’t yell, he wouldn’t blame. He’d just sigh and press his lips together, repressing his “I told you so.” And in a way, this is what she was dreading most: his tranquillity, his bottomless well of tenderness. He would try to make her feel better, telling her it was an honest mistake, promising they’d work it out together. He was always nicest to her when she deserved it the least.

Gathering her courage, Sophie turned to face him squarely. But Brian was uncharacteristically animated, swiveling in his chair and drumming his fingers in a way that looked almost gleeful. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“I think I just figured out there’s a piece of Saint-Porchaire on the loose.”

“A piece of what?”

“French ceramics from the fifteen hundreds. Really ornate.” He played his chair arms like bongos. “There’s probably only about eighty of them in the world, a few of them in museums. We don’t have any. Yet.”

“Is there one coming up at auction?”

Brian gave her a faint one-sided smile that, for him, represented unbridled joy. “I think it might still be in private hands.” He launched into the story: how he’d dug up the records of an 1893 estate sale in France, which showed the purchase of a small collection of Saint-Porchaire by the Philadelphia shipping magnate Paul Wilder. How he’d traced three of the pieces—a cup, saltcellar, and candlestick—to Wilder’s son, who had eventually bequeathed them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How he’d figured out that there had been two candlesticks in the original sale—not one, as everyone had always assumed.