The Stager: A Novel (15 page)

“Be careful, Elsa,” the Stager says. She’s still standing in the doorway.

“What’s the big deal? You look like you’re afraid!”

“Okay, I have an idea. Instead of reading a story, maybe you can help me. Why don’t you take those pictures off the dresser and very carefully put them away.”

“Okay. I can be the stager helper!”

“Exactly. In fact, take everything off the dresser and, very, very carefully, put it all … how about right there?” she says, pointing to the big carved chest.

“The maharajah cabinet?”

“Whatever … the one right there.”

“Yeah, that’s the maharajah cabinet,” I explain. “We call it that because, look, you can see the maharajah painted there. He’s playing polo! My mom had this shipped back when she went to India for work.”

“Yes, fine, put the pictures in there. But be very careful,” she says. She’s still standing in the doorway.

“She got the bed in India, too, when she went there to have a meeting. She got it on the same trip when she got the maharajah cabinet. We had to wait, like, three months for it to be shipped.”

“The bed? No, she got it in Jakarta.”

“That’s in…”

“Indonesia.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“That Jakarta is in Indonesia?”

“No, silly! That she got the bed in Indonesia!”

“Oh … I don’t really know that. I’m just saying it looks Indonesian.”

“Have you been there?”

“I have.”

“Why? Do you get to travel all over the world like my mom and go on television?”

“No, sweetheart, I don’t. But once I went to Indonesia with a friend.”

“That’s funny. My mom went to Indonesia with a friend, and she told me she almost bought a bed there but something bad happened and so she didn’t. That’s why, when she saw this bed in India and it looked almost the same, she said she had to buy it. I want to go to Indonesia with a friend someday. Maybe with Diana.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” the Stager says.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I’m just talking too much. Here, do me another favor,” she says, “as long as we’re here and you are being so helpful.” She goes into the green bathroom and comes back with a cloth and tells me to wipe the top of my mom’s dresser. Then she tells me to go to my dad’s dresser and also to take everything off the top and put it in the maharajah cabinet, too. Then she tells me to wipe
that
with the cloth, like I don’t have anything better to do, like clean my own room, or do my homework.

“Why don’t you just come in here and do this yourself?” I ask.

“You are doing such a great job, I don’t have to,” she says.

“Do you want me to put my dad’s medicines away, too?”

“His medicines?”

“Yes. Here, on the dresser, he has this little tray. But I guess he took most of the bottles to London. I think this one is empty, so maybe I should throw it away.”

“No, you shouldn’t throw it away. Look, just put it in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, okay?”

I remember what my mother has said about privacy, and feel a wave of shame. Even though she says that things to do with fathers staying in their rooms and taking pills for depression are all “totally normal,” they are also not meant to be “publicly broadcast.” Those were the words my mom used when she spoke to me about keeping things private after my teacher called her to say I’d been talking about my dad at school. I get it, but I also know what “publicly broadcast” means, and it’s not as if I actually went on television and talked to millions of people about it. And if I did, at least I wouldn’t have the lace of my bra showing.

“Fine. I’ll put it in the medicine cabinet. But aren’t you going to come in here and stage the bathroom?”

“Yes, I will. Maybe tomorrow. I’m a little tired right now.”

“If you’re tired, you should come lie down. You should rest, so we can paint again. I have an idea. Instead of painting just one rabbit in a chair, we paint, like, a hundred tiny rabbits in a hundred tiny chairs. I was thinking we could make a grid, like a wall calendar, but instead of dates, each one would have a different rabbit in a different chair.”

“That’s very creative, Elsa.”

“It could be a tribute to Dominique. Maybe we could even make a Dominique wall calendar.”

“Great idea. But it sounds like a lot of work. Maybe we should wait until we have more time and energy.”

“Well, if you come in here and have a rest, you’ll have energy! I’m telling you, this is the best bed in the world. Sometimes when my mom and dad are away I like to sleep in it.”

“I can’t lie in your parents’ bed, Elsa. That’s just not very … professional.”

Her phone starts ringing, but she just stands there. I take it out of her bag and hold it up in the air. “Come in and get it!” I say.

“It’s okay. Just let it go to voice mail.”

I look at the display. “It’s Amanda.”

“Okay, thanks, Elsa. I’ll call her back.”

“Do you want me to tell her that?”

“No, Elsa, I want you to put the phone back in my bag and to sit down, and even though it’s not my job to discipline you, I want you to behave. You are giving poor Nabila a lot of grief, and now look what you’re doing to me.”

The phone stops ringing, and then, a few seconds later, there’s a text from Amanda that says “c u at oldchester.” I report this news.

“Great. Thanks. I actually have to go, so can you give me my bag?”

“What’s oldchester?”

“It’s the name of the street where I’m staging a house.”

“You’re staging another house?”

“Yes. That’s my job, remember?”

“Is it nice? Is it nicer than our house?”

“It’s nice, but it’s very modern, very different from your house. Listen, I really do have to go,” she says. “I’m going to be late as it is.”

“You can’t go, because I have your bag.”

“I’m aware of that, you scoundrel. Can I have it back, please?” She’s switching strategies, trying to sweeten me up.

“Not until you come in here and see how comfortable the bed is. And you said you’d tell me a story!”

“If I come in there, I’m going to tickle you!”

“So tickle me!”

“Elsa, this is really ridiculous. We’ve just wasted all the time I had for storytelling. We’ll do it tomorrow. I promise. And we’ll paint, and we’ll work on your calendar idea, but right now I really must go.”

I reach into her bag and start to dig through it. “Let me just show you the wallet … Where is it? Boy, this is a huge bag, and you have so much stuff in here!”

“Elsa, it’s really not polite to rifle through someone else’s personal belongings.”

“Yeah, just a sec … What’s this?” I feel something hard and cold and round with two sharp points. It takes me a second to realize what it is, and when I do, I scream even louder than when I’d found the dead rabbit in the pool.

“Elsa!” the Stager says. “Good grief. Calm down!”

I take a deep breath and scream again.

Nabila comes running up the stairs, and she, too, says “Elsa, calm down!”

Suddenly I can’t breathe. I’m making loud wheezing noises. The Stager comes into the room and pulls me down into a sitting position and rubs my back while Nabila runs to my room and gets my inhaler. I need two puffs before I can breathe freely again. Then I exclaim: “The Stager is a thief!”

The Stager looks at me, her eyes wide. “Elsa! That’s a horrible thing to say. Apologize!”

“You
are
a thief! Look, Nabila. She has the pig!” I pull it out of the bag and hold it up in the air. “The Stager stole the pig.”

We all stare at the little pig, its ears sticking straight up, the crooked, jaunty smile on its face. I give it a shake. We hear the rattle, like it has bits of sand inside.

PART II

DIFFERENT CHAIRS

EVE

It’s true that in my friendship with Bella there was always a slight unease, a micro-seed of discord that might have remained dormant but for the dramatic circumstances of our demise. The first time I laid eyes on her, my body tensed and my system went on full alert, as if with some primal knowledge of this friendship, of its capacity to nurture and transform me, and then inflict a devastating wound.

My response that first night was weirdly physical, although, in retrospect, that likely had to do with her smell. A gentle breeze, a harbinger of the thunderstorm that would soon send us all rushing indoors, hectic with the thrill of impending catastrophe that only an innocent weather event can bring, delivered to the pillar against which I was leaning the distinctive whiff of Bella: Jo Malone gardenia lotion, and Tide laundry detergent, as I would soon come to learn.

There were twelve of us summer interns, and about twenty editors and assorted VIP guests gathered at our boss’s P Street mansion that evening. We were ushered out back for pre-dinner mingling, into a garden so stiffly manicured that even the rosebushes looked starched. A glimpse of the swimming pool glistening in the middle distance of the sprawling grounds made me begin to perspire, and I tried to be discreet in using the tiny cloth cocktail napkin to mop the beads of sweat that pooled at my neck. Uniformed waiters proffered drinks and a variety of ethnically incongruent finger foods: kebobs, sushi, and samosas had been staples of the rotation so far. It was hard to look professional while ripping chicken off a skewer with one’s teeth, and nearly impossible not to dribble the accompanying peanut dipping sauce, but this seemed preferable to giving the impression of being too nervous, or weight-conscious, to eat.

Bella, a few feet away and in a white dress, seemed to be suffering no such qualms about etiquette. I watched her pop a California roll in her mouth and then, while chewing, take a sip of wine, accidentally dribble a bit on her white linen dress, and dab at the spot with a napkin, all while carrying on a conversation with the deputy political editor. Personally, I would have been embarrassed if I’d spotted my dress with wine, or worried I might have rice stuck in my teeth, but I got the impression that Bella didn’t care, and such absolute self-confidence was the quality I would come to admire most over the course of our complicated, and ultimately devastating, friendship.

Bella and I hadn’t had much previous contact at work, although I’d noticed her in the newsroom, looking like the sort of girl reporter only a fashion editor could dream up—as if any of us, apart from Bella anyway, really wore pencil skirts, tailored blouses, and pumps with just the right amount of heel to work. She was an intern on the business desk, and she unabashedly explained to anyone who asked that she was essentially just doing time at the paper, expanding her own knowledge base before moving on to banking, and that she had no real aspirations of becoming a journalist. This didn’t mean she wouldn’t excel, of course. Bella excelled at everything she did.

I was doing time myself, although without the direction or focus of my future best friend. For me this was a complete lark. As with everything in my life, I had sort of drifted into this place. I was an artist, a floater, an oddity. I was apparently the only applicant in the history of the intern program to have specified the Home and Design section as her first-choice assignment.

Despite our different interests and professional metabolisms, Bella and I became fast friends. There was an easy, if unlikely, camaraderie between us, as well as what would quickly develop into deep affection, but the thing that threw us together initially was (and this is embarrassing in its simplicity and its clichéd, girlfriendy nature) our shared love of books. Not just any books, but, well, clichéd, girlfriendy books, the sort that serve as a code for people who think, or think they think, the same way—
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
cropped up in our first conversation, and I would come to wonder, with the subsequent high drama that seemed to fuel Bella’s life, if she had simply read too many books. Maybe she couldn’t settle into normalcy because she saw herself as some tragic femme, some postmodern Holly Golightly who happened to be saddled with dull middle-class concerns like a husband and a mortgage. That was one way to look at it. Another was that she was a narcissistic woman who made a series of bad choices that resulted in your garden-variety mess.

We were both several years older than the others in our group, most of whom had just finished graduate school, and a few of whom were just out of college. Also, perhaps more compellingly, we were among the very few interns who were already married, and, meaningfully or not, we quickly discovered that both of our marriages were showing early warning signs of trouble.

I was late to journalism, having spent most of the first post-college decade painting, reading voraciously, and picking up occasional freelance work in the art department of the local newspaper, where my husband, whom I had married the same year I graduated from college, worked. I had applied to this intern program on a whim, or maybe on an unspoken dare. My chances of landing a coveted slot were about the same, I figured, as those of buying a winning Powerball ticket. I’d put in an application only because of Vince. Vince, who had been a part of my life for so long, since junior high school in fact, that he simply
was
, like the watch you strap around your wrist each morning, or maybe like the wrist itself. That we had come to take each other for granted was actually more the strength of our marriage than the problem. The problem, which I hadn’t yet fully come to appreciate, was on evidence here, at this garden party, where I leaned against the pillar of a gazebo, and where he did not.

Vince had a graduate degree in journalism and two years’ experience on the small but edgy alternative paper in Minneapolis, where we had lived until moving to D.C. a month earlier. I’d always been the first pair of eyes on everything he wrote; accordingly, I’d been coaching him on the internship application. At some point along the way, I began to fantasize about my own answers to the questions, and I wondered how one embarked on a career as a writer, or maybe even as a professional illustrator, in the field of home design. I found this idea so intriguing that I would have been happy to be just the person who brought the writer or professional illustrator his or her lunch. I tossed out the idea of putting in my own application, and Vince was encouraging, if condescendingly so. He assumed that I didn’t stand a chance; intern slots at the premier newspaper in Washington, D.C., were usually awarded either to hot-shot kids just out of the Ivy League, or to young reporters, such as my husband, with already promising if fledgling careers, but almost certainly not to thirty-year-old women who had spent about a decade illustrating pictures of settees and chairs for furniture catalogues. I can only assume my application caught the eye of some similarly aimless soul on the selection committee who was impressed by my half-baked essay about the intersection of art and journalism and the benefits of not getting caught in a rut, or, perhaps more inspiringly, someone had actually believed in what I was proposing to do, and thought some of my whimsical suggestions for improving the newspaper’s anemic Home and Design section were worth exploring. Whatever the explanation, I was hired into the intern class of the summer of 2000, and Vince was not. Nevertheless, it seemed a good moment for change, so we loaded a U-Haul and moved.