Building a Home with My Husband (6 page)

“We’re eliminating so much!” I yell.

“I know,” Hal says calmly.

“Aren’t you bummed about everything we’re cutting out?”

“No. I let go of the results.”

“Well, at least you could shout a little!”

“I don’t need to,” he says, smiling. “I’ve outsourced the yelling to you.”

He sends the revised documents to Dan. The figure comes way down, but not enough. So Hal eliminates awnings he designed for the southern windows. He calls for white paint except for one “accent” wall in each room. He keeps one major feature: a full-height wall of windows on the back of the kitchen. But he scales down other goals. When I get agitated, he just says, “My job is problem-solving, and that’s what this is. That’s
all
this is.”

In this way, the price drops to $171,000—way more than we’d hoped to pay for far less than we’d wanted. But we will get what Hal has come to feel, and I actually do agree, is essential: the demolition of several interior walls to create bigger, sunnier rooms on the first and second floors, the demolition of the rear kitchen wall, the extension of the kitchen by five feet (eliminating the back porch and requiring a hand-dug foundation), remodeled bathroom, remodeled kitchen, new wiring, new plumbing, new ductwork, new insulation, new windows, central air, new appliances, new cabinetry, new finishes, brick cleaning outside, brick painting.

Relieved, I ask whether we’ll be signing a contract. “The architect-contractor relationship—and the client-contractor relationship—is set up to be adversarial,” he tells me. It’s a good idea to do whatever you can do to mitigate that. People who are less familiar with the industry than I am should almost certainly negotiate a more formal contract, but I feel comfortable with a letter agreement from Dan.” The letter, which Hal adds is legally binding, has a payment schedule, a list of items to be purchased by us, and a statement that Dan carries all insurance—something that, though we can’t possibly know it now, will become radiantly important later.

“Are you okay with this?” Hal asks, his pen poised above the letter.

My face feels tight. Such a huge bill won’t mean debt, but it will mean digging deep into our savings, as well as my filling the next years with talks instead of cutting back. But Hal is confident that everything will work out. “Yeah,” I say, hiding my wince.

That night, although I go to bed early, I lie awake. This renovation journey has already dragged on way too long and we haven’t even started. Of course, we also haven’t suffered—yet. But even if we escape suffering all the way to the end, the experience will not culminate in the house of our dreams. So far it is, in fact, like so much of life: the incandescent promise that you’ll receive every glory that you want, followed by the hard shock of regular old reality.

I get out of bed. At the top of the stairway to the third floor I see Hal, not in front of the drafting table, but with a guitar in his hands, for probably the first time in months.

“Can’t sleep?” he says.

“It’s just so expensive,” I say, “and so far away from the fantasy. And I’m afraid.”

“I’m nervous, too.”

I know he is, yet his eyes have a serenity that I do not feel.

“Come on, Baboo,” he says. He sets down the guitar, stands up, and takes me in his arms. “Few things in life are gained without risk. It’s time to do this.”

His skin is comforting. But even as we are standing in this embrace, and I know we are going to be on this journey together, I now grasp that we will be traveling separately. He will be more involved. I will, if I choose, be free of whatever crises arise—and be the one who agonizes. I feel lucky that the client has a husbitect. Yet I also feel oddly alone.

We hold each other for a long time, our bodies moving with our breathing, our thoughts synchronized one moment, far apart the next. It is, I realize, our own awkward dance. And I suddenly understand a new lesson about love: that when your life doubles because you accept another, and you’re happy because he’s happy and he’s sad because you’re sad, and you enter the biggest decision that the two of you have ever made, this unbalanced dance might be the dance you’ll do most often. I wonder if it is even what love is.

MOBILIZATION

P·A·C·K·I·N·G

“
Y
ou’re joking,” I say to Hal.

“Would I joke about this?”

“Move out of the house? Like
completely
?”

“When they demo these plaster walls, dust will go everywhere.”

“We can wear masks.”

“Every day they’ll start bright and early at seven in the morning.”

“I’ll get up at six.”

“What about the power tools? They’re loud and they’ll be going all the time.”

“I’m still traveling a lot—and I’ll just spend my writing days at the library.”

He sighs, then perks back up. “Okay, contestants. It is now time for Final Jeopardy.”

I turn to the cats. “See what I have to put up with?”

He continues in his best Alex Trebek voice. “Excessive exposure to take-out meals, Porta Potties, and thermal underwear.” Then he hums the Jeopardy jingle: “Do do do do, do do do.”

“I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

“
Ehnnk
.” He makes the sound of the cut-off buzzer. “The question is, What happens when Dan’s guys gut the bathroom and kitchen and shut off the heat?”

“All of that’s going to happen?”

He raises a brow and nods.

“At the same time?”

“Well, we
could
pay them for an extra year of work.”

I remember something a friend told me when I visited during her renovation and watched her husband and son almost come to blows. “I once saw a cartoon,” she said as her son slammed into his room. “The devil is standing before two doors. One door leads to hell with all the flames. The other one is living in your house while it’s being renovated.”

“Okay,” I say to Hal. “We’ll move.”

 

The night we make this decision, I walk into my study—and almost collapse in despair. Like probably ninety percent of the world, I dread packing. This is not, though, because I get overwhelmed by the prospect of organizing. The problem is far more seismic than that. Actually, the problem is many layers of problems, with each one going deeper than the last until you hit the molten core at the center of them all.

The most obvious layer—the one that stops me right off the bat—is the sheer volume of my belongings, most of which are crammed into this room. I’ve moved over twenty times in my life, the last when we married, at which point I felt buoyed by the certainty that I’d reached my final destination. Then I learned that the house, with its four closets and miserly square footage, was unfit for forty years of possessions. Within a week of our honeymoon, my belongings were straining every drawer, shelf, and cabinet. We added storage units in the only available room, my study, going right up to the nine-foot ceiling. But after three more years, the dam burst, overflowing even the chairs, windowsills, and rug.

Aside from not being able to walk into my study without wading through recent flotsam—souvenirs from my travels, paperwork from my classes, correspondence from friends (I’m a devotee of handwritten letters), newly laundered clothes, books, mugs—there’s the peril of the enormous amount of furniture wedged in here, some of it jutting way out into the room. A seven-and-a-half-foot IKEA wardrobe. A dresser we rescued from an abandoned house twenty years ago. A chest of drawers I shared with Laura in elementary school. A quirky end table from my grandmother. Wooden crates that were Hal’s first design-build project.

Now we’re approaching the real issue. I’m still not all the way there, but just knowing I’m getting warmer makes my knees weak. Because the next layer to the problem is that every item in here has a story behind it. Some, like Hal’s wooden crates, tell vignettes, whereas others that are strewn around the room add up to novels. But regardless of how extensive the narrative, each item captures a particular story with a particular person. Some of these relationships are ongoing. Some survived interruptions. And some were with individuals I will never see again.

The end table from my grandmother, for instance. She’s been gone for twenty years. The finger cymbals from the year I studied belly dancing, where I met Amina, a beautician with a strong shimmy who shaped my unruly mop into a flattering cut, then passed out of my life following our final performance. The Tupperware container I once borrowed from Frankie, the hot dog-eating bookkeeper at my food cooperative. When he began dying from AIDS, I visited him every week at home, relieving his partner from duty, and as Frankie and I grew closer the container grew more important until I couldn’t bear the thought of returning it.

Those stories all ended without regret or ill will. But I have keep-sakes from more complicated pairings. The Monty Python album I listened to with my teenage boyfriend before he ended our romance and I cried for months. The crystal night light I kept on during calls with my friend Ethan, whose despair over having married a woman who was not his soul mate ended when he left her, and, to my shock and sorrow, stopped calling me. The scarves I wore as a college student to visit my friend Marie in her dorm room, where she would strum her guitar while we sang Beatles songs—a habit we indulged in, on and off, until our thirties, when one day on a phone call, she insisted that I had to have children right now, as she had, even though Hal and I had just broken up and I was too depressed to think straight; in mere seconds, my affection for her drained away. The single earrings from pairs I shared with Sandy, my best friend from fifth grade, who went through many inner trials, which we discussed in letters for decades.

Usually I forget that I’m surrounded by relics—after all, I rarely use most of them. Then a pen rolls under my grandmother’s table, or I’ll open a drawer and find a box of old letters, and that’s all it will take to put me in a memento trance. I’ll recall how, after I first learned Monty Python routines with that boyfriend, we went outside to a wintry golf course and kissed in the moonlight. A Chinese silk jacket will return me to dancing with Marie at a friend’s wedding reception. The stained glass I bought because it reminded me of Sandy’s love of the shore will take me back to a summer day on a boardwalk when I realized that drugs were ruling her life.

So I stand here, knowing that as soon as I start to pack, I’ll be at my mementos’ mercy. Every story I’ve ever lived through—some essential to the person I am now—will return to me, possibly leaving residues of remorse about compassion that arrived too late, resentment about apologies never offered, or wistfulness about vanished affinities. Yet I must pack, and since our four closets will drop to two after the renovation, I
have
to exile some of these belongings. But how can I leave the many persons I once was, and the many people who once loved me, for good? And how can I face the innermost problem with packing, the one even deeper than these?

I shut the door and walk away.

 

Dan sets a starting date of August 8. The first order of business isn’t packing, but finding a temporary home. I expect this task to prove daunting, but I’ve always been someone who makes friends wherever I’ve lived, worked, visited, shopped, exercised, even dined. In fact, one of my goals in life has been to meet everyone in the world, and it so happens that in June, Natalie, a gracious Delawarean and new friend who once hosted me at her book group, moves her mother out of a twin fifteen minutes from our house. With the market so robust that she’s in no rush to sell, she offers to rent it to Hal and me. We drive over, find it acceptable, and say yes.

Thus able to set a moving date of August 1, I finally return to my study. It’s already late June, but I feel emboldened. Not only has an unexpected generosity saved the day, but the stress surrounding the film made from my book is over, Hal’s negotiations with Dan are behind us, and ahead lies only the future. This isn’t to say that I’ve come to any conclusions about that future. In fact, with more time to mull over my Search for Life Purpose 2.0, the quandary has worsened. I can’t pursue a cure for cancer or a career as a psychotherapist, as I have no aptitude for science, and our compromised savings prohibit a return to school. Nor, since I want to keep waking up with Hal and am not especially adventurous, will I be joining the Peace Corps. Founding a beneficent nonprofit briefly enticed me, but then I acknowledged that I had no single-minded vision, zero funding, and just enough wherewithal to know how little I know. The truth is that every idea that’s come to mind is so impractical or at odds with my personality that I’m as aimless as I was months ago.

So packing feels like a superlative diversion, and I’m able to commence with vigor.

In the first few days, I energetically thumb through all my clothes, decide which ones are inconsistent with my current tastes or have never complemented my physique, bag them up, and toss them into bins at Goodwill. Equally brisk is the weeding out of books that I will never reread. Thousands of dollars at cash registers disappear into donations at the library.

But come July, I pry open cabinets and wardrobes—and there they are, my mementos, each item a page in my book of life. Immediately my momentum comes to a complete halt, and all moments rush inside this one. I pick up the Tupperware container. Behind it, I’m surprised to find, I stored my old bottle of sandlewood cologne. I dab a dot of fragrance behind each ear, and then Frankie is resurrected before my eyes. He’s in his bed, singing along with a video of Bette Midler on his big screen TV, and I am entering his room for a visit. Even though I don’t make a sound, and he recently became blind, he turns toward me. “Umm,” he says, “I love your perfume,” and I go toward him, both of us laughing again. I push the Tupperware to the side. There is the Maxfield Parrish address book I bought a few years ago because it reminded me of Marie’s classic beauty. Inside, I secured pages of song lyrics, each in her writing, and as I flip through, I am again sitting with Marie’s family on a steamy July Fourth, and she and her brother are trying to one-up each other on their guitars, and we are all singing these songs to the high heavens. In the next drawer is the crystal night light. I plug it in, and hear Ethan again, over the phone, reading me the bedtime story that he wrote for his little daughter, and that inspired me to buy a pop-up
Alice in Wonderland
book. Oh, and on this shelf is the green dress I wore to Sandy’s wedding, and I am again at the reception with Hal, watching Sandy dance with her groom. “Maybe she’ll be okay,” I’d whispered to Hal, and we’d exchanged looks of guarded hope.