The Stager: A Novel (17 page)

It seems I have a knack, which may not be anything to boast about—being able to strip away the personality of a house requires, in itself, a certain personality, or maybe what it requires is just the lack of one. Whatever the explanation, it would appear I was a smashing success, even though I stumbled into this career, if we can call it that, by accident.

I had some general knowledge of the subject, of course, having worked for six years as managing editor of the monthly glossy magazine
MidAtlantic Home
, a job I was offered after two years at the newspaper. At the magazine, we had a regular rotation of stories on home staging, and we’d usually weave in some incarnation of the above-referenced bullet points, tucked discreetly—or maybe not so discreetly—into an editorial package declaring some quirky shade of color to be the new “off-white.” Think “Sea Glass,” for example. Aquamarine by a different name. Hold on to your hats and prepare for a brief run on Duron DCR077.

You were meant to be seduced, too, by the complicated balloon shades we suggested you could easily make at home “for less than $100 in under three hours” (sure, if you kidnapped three seamstresses and locked them in your attic), or by the exquisite Ushak rug, a nice replica of which was available at Home Depot, which happened to be one of our best advertisers. Back when there were advertisers, which is to say, back before I lost my job.

Even though I had some basic intellectual understanding of home staging, and I had read
Staging Homes to Sell in This Still Volatile Market!
, to know all of this, and actually to make it so, to get down literally on my hands and knees and bring a house to move-in-ready condition, is a very different thing from editing stories about how someone else might do it. Just because a person loves to read cookbooks doesn’t mean she can actually cook.

I committed my first act of home staging on the day of an ice storm. My doorbell rang, and there stood my neighbor in an arresting ensemble, a bracing slash of red wool coat against the white winter landscape. When I saw her, I instinctively prepared for some sort of complaint: we’d lived side by side for nearly nine years, but our relations had always been chilly, mostly because, since Vince moved out and stopped caring for the garden, pretty much every bit of vegetation on my property has emigrated to her yard.

Her complaints were frequent and vociferous: my bamboo had crept under the fence and was now interfering with three separate flower beds; my bindweed (as if I owned bindweed; as if I even knew what bindweed was) was choking her roses; and we’d recently had a rather unpleasant exchange about the fact that my cherry tree was dripping fruit onto her patio, staining her pavement red. This seemed to me a nonstarter. Cherry trees dripped fruit. So be it. I refused to cut it down. She thought otherwise, and after weeks of fraught exchanges, we finally agreed to split the cost of hacking the limbs that splayed into her yard. There’d been a few more incidents, too, mostly to do with my dog, who was also partial to her yard; no matter what I did, Moses continued to tunnel her way next door. My most recent solution was to embed two feet of chicken wire in the dirt below the fence line. This had done the trick, at least so far, and now that the ground was frozen, I couldn’t imagine what reason Amanda might have to be ringing my doorbell, especially in the midst of a storm.

Amanda was one of the most successful independent Realtors in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region, and she had come to me that morning with a favor to ask: her car battery was dead, AAA advertised a three-hour wait, her husband was out of town, and the local taxi monopoly wasn’t even answering the phone. She had to meet some buyers, in from Germany, at a house they were about to take to contract, and she wondered if I could give her a ride.

As much as I dreaded prolonged interaction with her, I was intoxicated by the business of Amanda that day: the briefcase bursting with paperwork, the stylish coat cinched at the waist with a thick leather belt, the mention of wealthy Germans, their pockets bulging with euros, or maybe even with gold. I told her to come in and to give me a minute to change out of my sweatpants and grab my keys.

That day I began a new career as a home stager. And, as if I were the protagonist in some Shakespearean drama, or, perhaps more accurately, in some farce, I would soon find myself thrust center stage back into Bella’s life.

*   *   *

AMANDA AND I
drove the three miles to the property without incident that day. When we arrived, however, there was no sign of the clients. We waited in the car for nearly an hour, with the engine running for heat. I will abbreviate the ridiculous saga of Amanda’s inability to reach the buyers by phone, which involved her slow, dim realization that she did not have international dialing enabled on her wireless plan, and her equally belated understanding, already quite obvious to me, that she was being stood up.

I will shorten, too, the narrative of how, once we finally went inside, I won over in friendship the eighty-five-year-old widow who owned the decrepit rambler, and made a suggestion or two about sprucing up her house. (I know this may seem full of irrelevant detail, but it helps explain how I came to stumble—innocently!—into Bella’s home.)

Perhaps I was simply relieved to be out of my lonely, boring purgatory that day, but I set about, unasked, manically plugging the holes in the widow’s walls, making the foyer look twenty years younger by repurposing a mirror from the attic and a table from the corner of the living room.

I also crafted my first staging tip that day: foyers are far more critical than people realize. Although it ought to be obvious that foyers set the tone, most people give their entryways little thought, even though these are pretty easy to design. All you really need is a mirror so people can check for food in their teeth on the way out the door, and a small table on which to toss mail and keys. A dim, lousy foyer, or one without functionality, is like a flaccid run of words in the lede of the story, and just as you lose your reader, you’ve already doomed the sale.

Here was another small, related epiphany, the realization that being a home stager was a quite logical next step after being a magazine editor. Home staging and editing share a process; both are about taking what you have and making it flow from the top down. After the lede paragraph of the foyer, you need a nut graph in the living room. This is where you take the key elements and put them in the most prominent spot, and then, from there, you work with what remains. Occasionally you might need to bring in something that was missing from the start—have the reporter contact a new source or find a more coherent quote, or swap in a new armchair or lamp. Bad sentences, bad household décor—both are about untangling things and finding the hidden gem. There is always something to work with, even if it’s mostly crap.

I looked around this sad old house and felt myself begin to burn; the certainty of my ability and my intensity of desire were somewhat embarrassing. To fix this place up felt not like work or play, but like some sort of inherent need. I wondered if it was possible that I was put on this earth, was hardwired, to repair the world through interior design.

Amanda and I had a cup of tea with the homeowner and looked (Amanda impatiently and not very graciously) at photographs of her children and grandchildren. I noted how well tended the house had once been, and gushed to her about the potential to renew: with a little elbow grease, some pruning of the bushes that were eclipsing access to the front door, a few replaced lightbulbs, the opening of windows, and a fresh coat of paint, a person might be able to make the future visible here, as opposed to merely past decay.

This was step one of what I would come to think of as staging therapy, because, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of emotional volatility involved in selling, never mind staging, a house, and homeowners have been known to burst into tears and/or verbally abuse the stager. My techniques have proved largely effective. In this case, the woman began to speak enthusiastically about having me restore the place to its rightful mid-century grandeur, and this is how I found myself in Amanda’s occasional, less-lucrative-than-it-should-be, cash-under-the-table employ. I worked magic on that old rambler, and it sold within a week for $15K over the asking price.

*   *   *

THE EUPHORIA I
found in my new role, particularly at my age, might be interpreted as a positive thing if you are the sort who thinks it good to find happiness in being poorly compensated for creative work, or pathetic if you consider that I had, until recently, been making a six-figure salary in publishing. There is a silver lining, however: it is apparently possible to hit rock bottom and bounce back if a person limits her expectations, and as it happens, severely lowered expectations are themselves the silver lining of finally hitting rock bottom, which is where Amanda had found me that day: unemployed, not quite divorced, in the same clothes I’d slept in, defrosting hot-dog buns to use as toast in an effort to avoid having to get properly dressed to go to the grocery store.

Cash-flow problems aside, I was slowly coming to terms with, if not quite at peace with, my circumstances. I never wanted to be the kind of woman whose telling detail was that she couldn’t get beyond something, and by this I mean either some small if jarring crisis of normal life, or some cataclysmic event of the sort that would, and should, leave scars. My radar was finely tuned to such stories, because I was beginning to realize I had, despite my protestations, become the protagonist of one myself. Nevertheless, if office gossip was to be believed, there were a lot of damaged people in this world, or at least there had been in the employ of
MidAtlantic Home
. Rumor had it that one of our assistant editors, for example, had been jilted by her fiancé twenty years earlier and that she
never got over it
, and this came to define her, even though she seemed to be one of the happiest people I knew and she was now married, with a dog and three kids. My former in-laws, with whom I’m still in touch, had sold their stock at the exact wrong moment, losing about half of their nest egg, only to see its value recover within weeks. Five years later, their financial catastrophe still inserts itself into nearly every conversation; even a compliment about dinner will incite a monologue from my father-in-law about how they bought the meat on sale at Costco, how they now have to drive forty minutes to shop in bulk because of that goddamned Microsoft stock.

A small quake resulting in four deaths and one miscarriage. The dissolution of a marriage. The betrayal by a best friend—all for the sake of one poet/financier/cad. These are the sorts of things that a person might never get over. But you don’t hear me going on about this night and day.

*   *   *

“BELLA” MEANS “BEAUTIFUL,”
yes, but there’s another meaning. Belladonna is a herbaceous plant native to Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. The foliage and berries are extremely toxic and cause hallucinations that are said to be unpleasant. It was used as a poison by Macbeth, before he became king of Scotland, to decommission opposing troops.

It can lead to severe confusion.

Vince once suggested that I was obsessed with Bella. This might have been, in other circumstances, shrugged off as a casual remark, like noting that a person is obsessed with sudoku, or with getting a perfect tan. Or it might have been an accusation, which in this case it was. But Vince was wrong, or he simply didn’t understand the bonds of female friendship, or maybe he was just jealous of my having any outside relationships at all.

I might suggest that
he
was the one obsessed with Bella, or at least he was obsessed with the idea that I was obsessed with her. He blamed her, or, rather, my supposed obsession with her, for all manner of things both extreme and unrelated, and held Bella responsible for what he always referred to derisively as my
ambition
. I mostly ignored this, and figured he was just jealous that I had a friend. That trip on which I accompanied Bella to Indonesia, for example, he once referred to as the beginning of our end, and, eerily, that was even before circumstances conspired to make this so.

In those early years at the newspaper, and even as I’d transitioned to my new role at
MidAtlantic Home
, I thought that if Vince had had something productive going on in his own life he might have let up on me, and given me the space I needed at the time. He was always at home, anxious and brooding and complaining and morose, and I’d wished he’d find something to distract him—a hobby, or even a woman. Not that I really wished for that, but I don’t think I would have been shocked; so many of our colleagues at the newspaper had been sleeping around that keeping track of the latest entanglements had become something of a sport.

The subject had become sort of boring to me, these people who couldn’t control their libidos (although I think it was really their egos they couldn’t keep in check), who couldn’t see a step ahead to the wrecks they were about to make of their lives. So I didn’t find Bella’s having an affair so surprising—although sneaking around with Raymond Branch was of course a bit ballsy, and then the bit with the Yankees first baseman was too shocking for words. Rather, that a snake like him could derail someone as assured and accomplished as Bella was so puzzling to me, such a mystery of the universe, that I soaked up every detail in an effort to understand, and I even began to take notes.

*   *   *

IT BEGAN THE
day after the garden party. Lunch led straight to the hotel where Raymond was staying, Seema already en route back to the children in London. Bella told me everything, from what kind of soap they used at the Georgetown Ritz-Carlton to the labels inside of Raymond’s shirts. She provided so many intimate details that I wondered if there was some other level of pathology involved, if the physical and emotional pleasures of the affair were possibly secondary to the electric charge of telling me. I learned what they ordered from room service, the contents of Raymond’s toiletry kit, his preferred methods of coupling, and, as the months ticked by, even the terms of endearment used in the e-mails he would send. I feigned indifference, but I suppose I was absorbing the details vicariously in my own, possibly perverse way.