The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (24 page)

The house is the stage set for the drama we hope our lives will be or become. And it’s much easier to decorate the set than to control the drama or even find the right actors or even any actors at all. Thus the hankering for houses is often desire for a life, and the fervency with which we pursue them is the hope that everything will be all right, that we will be loved, that we will not be alone, that we will stop quarreling or needing to run away, that our lives will be measured, gracious, ordered, coherent, safe. Houses are vessels of desire, but so much of that desire is not for the physical artifact itself.

And then there is that ominous phrase,
behind closed doors
, for good décor doesn’t solve all these questions of conduct and discord and even violence and death. Think of the blood of her rapist/lover dripping through the nice carpeting to the elegant ceiling of the apartment below in Thomas Hardy’s novel
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, while Tess in her fashionable clothes breaks into a shuttered country mansion with her belatedly returned husband before going to jail and being hanged. Or of the domesticity of domestic violence in the United States, where women are encouraged to be afraid to leave the house but statistics suggest danger really lies inside with the known rather than outside with the unknown.

CRESCENT WRENCH

There is a flipside to this division of labor and desire, the huge population of men who might better than anyone earn the term
homemaker
, the carpenters, framers, cabinetmakers, plumbers, electricians, painters, plasterers, and other craftspeople, still overwhelmingly male, who actually make and remake and change houses, these independent contractors who show up in domestic space to cut it open, tear it up, make a mess, and then make it something else, make it approximate the dream of the homeowner. One builder I knew spoke of all the wealthy women he worked for whose beds were too full of pillows, another of the loneliness the repairmen were called upon to assuage: work they had not contracted for. These men in their canvas clothes and tool belts embody the role traditionally ascribed to women
in another respect: they spend a great deal of time shopping—for half-inch copper pipe, for flathead
" screws, for tongue-and-groove oak flooring, for Navajo white paint, for polished slate tiles—and every construction project is in part a little flurry of comings and goings from the supply stores that inhabit their own zone in almost every town and city, the resource pile from which each house arises with its own trails stretching back to brick factories and slate quarries and forests filtered through lumber mills. But it is the nature of American imagination to think largely of the consumer rather than the producer, and so homes belong to their owners, not to their makers in most representations. Thus domesticity has a secret masculinity, the empire of labor that built every realm of leisure. Martha Stewart, on the other hand, was punished for turning homemaking into empire building, and all her domestic arts were lost on the prison she was sentenced to for five months.

BUTCHER BLOCK

All these pictures in all the magazines and books and catalogues depict the home before life begins, the house with the flowers on the table and the pillows on the sofa and no one yet arrived, unrumpled sheets, uneaten cakes. Crime photographs show the aftermath of a drama, evidence that may include the lifeless corpse among the furniture and other trappings of everyday life that is no longer everyday or life, the domesticity of gone forever. Maybe all those magazines full of unpopulated pictures of granite and chrome kitchens and austerely elegant dining rooms and beautiful window treatments are crime scenes as God sees them, before anything happens, before our fate is known even to ourselves, before our time—as measured by alarm clocks or retro kitchen clocks or wood-encased mantelpiece clocks or the blinking red eye of the DVD player’s built-in digital clock shining out in the darkness or even an heirloom grandfather clock with sun and moon on its face—has run out.

Here in old police photographs are the scenes of the murder of Marie-Oliva LePrince on the Rue Saint Denis in Paris in 1898, strangled at the age of fifty by her twenty-one-year-old delivery boy Xavier Schneider. We learn from the photographs that her parlor had a hardwood floor of wide
dark planks with an interesting grain, a gilt clock under glass on a side table, a wallpaper that in black and white is startling in the boldness of its contrast. A landscape painting of a body of water surrounded by two dark coulisses of land and trees tilted forward from the wall on the left, the painting hovering above a frilly lampshade like a cloud above the sun. A pattern of beautiful botanical prints, each plant enclosed in a sort of double-pointed oval of wallpaper, adorned the room she used as the shop for her small business of making artificial flowers, which she sold along with feathers; and a little table is visible beyond, draped in a heavy fringed brocade, the doors paneled and painted dark, the chairs dark too. Here is her body sprawled in a dazzling cloud of natural light on another wide plank floor, half underneath a nice oval table whose surface, also caught in the blinding light from the window, seems to be spread with papers; behind her, the same cameos of botanical specimens, climbing up the wall just as calmly as though no one had been violently killed within a few feet of them. The candlestick on the chest of drawers is very nice too, tall with a twisting trunk. And the cloth on the oval table is thin this time, falling in ripples from the edge. Though Madame LePrince is still half under the table, lifeless as a piece of furniture but not nearly as stable, except in the photograph, which holds the threat of becoming itself in all its weirdness someone else’s home ornament, as the furniture no doubt became, and the tables may yet be in the living world, holding the burdens of another who knows nothing of the sad end of the feather dealer and flower maker.

A book of color pictures of Swedish houses I picked up recently shows a historic house with the same wide planks and dramatic wallpaper in one of the rooms, and they are what we are supposed to look at in the absence of drama, though drama there must have been in a place so old. But the bodies are nowhere.

DEEP FREEZE

Maybe the problem is pictures, that we think in pictures, and we want to: the point of a wedding may be to reduce the weather-like volatility of a relationship into an authoritative picture of cake, happiness, lace, and rented tuxedo. Homes too are imagined as they should be—the Platonic
version—before the mail begins to pile up on the table, before the collapsible pool dominating the yard leaves a round ring of brown on the grass, before our bodies leave their imprints in the furniture and their smudges on the walls, before the apple tree took on that strange lopsided shape, before the floor lost its sheen, before the last 117 purchases buried the architecture altogether. Dream homes are dreamt in pictures, and again and again, well-off people move to the country because the picture is so great: there are the mountains, here are the ten acres with wall or split-rail girdled round, in the middle is the rustic cabin or the rugged adobe or the ranch house with the stone fireplace. And like children in fantasy books, the buyers step into the picture only to find out that there is still the problem of time: the mountains are uplifting, but they want to do things, they want to talk to people, they want access to the comforts of civilization, and these may not be included with the elk or the woodpeckers or the aspen grove, let alone the blizzard, the snowed-out roads, the broken well pump; and so they move, and someone else comes along and tries out living in pictures. Or maybe we want to be still as pictures, keep inserting ourselves into them, but find we are too restless and active to stay in them. As though we wanted to be pressed flowers, but went on blooming and going to seed, decaying and regenerating.

NU BLINDS

In James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Leopold and Molly Bloom live, famously, at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, in a house big enough to allow two lives to pursue wildly different directions; we see him in the weak light of his kitchen pouring milk for the cat, “dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones,” hear her upstairs turning over and causing “the loose brass quoits of the bedstead” to jingle; we accompany him with some reading material to the jakes, the outhouse, in the back garden. Joyce’s real-life wife, Nora Barnacle, had grown up with her six siblings and parents in a tiny two-room house in Galway that seems hardly big enough to have accommodated a couple in love, a house in which every sneeze and scratch and mood must have been shared or at least widely known. What was absent in that house is individualism, the space for independent action and private choice.

On the other hand, a friend who is a high-end housepainter told me once of the new homes of the wealthy he was often hired to repaint, of the cathedral-ceilinged living rooms used only to impress the rare visitor, the bedrooms and suites so well appointed with private bathrooms and home entertainment systems that not only did the house provide a retreat from society but also an isolation of each from each, a sort of minimum security—for breaking out, not for breaking in—solitary confinement system. There were lonely trails, he told me, worn into the carpet by the walks from bedroom to refrigerator or microwave, as though each dweller had become furtive, an animal in its den, coming out only to feed, and not at the dinner table.

Imagine what was once the family space becoming a kind of terra incognita, the swampy wilderness to be traversed by each fugitive from communion, the deep carpet sprung up into grasslands and forests, the hundreds of miles of trackless waste between each bedroom, the bear traps laid for the unwary by some other wanderer who may be kin or killer or both, the roofs crumbling in, the blizzards whose snowfall makes it impossible to trace your own footprints backward to where you began to venture out, the blinding shafts of light, the wildlife arriving as it has in ruinous cities such as Rome then and Detroit now, the crumbling decay of old artifacts that may never be deciphered by anyone even before the jungle grows over them, the house as it is in our dream lives, where old fears and new rooms are constantly discovered, where every house contains, like our own heads, everything. Though it’s hard to know whether these families in suburban McMansions treading the plush carpets at separate times or the Barnacle crew had more room inside.

TALL HEDGE

I knew an artist once who had a beautiful home that kept growing, being improved, with garden, ornament, plastered walls, a kitchen wide enough to waltz across and more, a private paradise, but one that cost so much that the more it grew the more she was forced to work her job in another state to pay for it, a conundrum as good as that of Achilles and the Tortoise: would she have been better off settling for a pretty-good home and more time
to spend in it? She was only an extreme version of an ordinary story: the family that moves to the outskirts in order to have a larger home, but in so doing, gives up not only the public amenities that cities have and suburbs don’t but also surrenders much of the time that might otherwise have been spent with the kids, time that will now be spent commuting alone in a car. The house is the picture of pleasure, while the amount of time it takes to earn it or make it or maintain it or even reach it from the office is just an idea correlated to clocks. It’s partly in pursuit of ever-larger homes—the average American home has doubled in the last half century—that Americans got so frantic.

In other times and places, privacy wasn’t even a luxury: the duc de Saint-Simone reports that in Versailles, Louis XIV would hold audiences while he was on the toilet, and his dressing was a state ceremony with many privileged to participate in drawing the bed curtains and handing in the holy water and dressing gown. Of course the sacred body of the king was mystically one with the body of the nation, but even ordinary people relied on communal sites for many of their personal needs: the great bathhouses of Eastern Europe, the baker’s oven where you took your loaves or roast in times and places without home ovens, the town swimming pool, and the movie theaters all of us old enough to remember life before home video attended like temples of darkness. More of our lives used to be in public, among strangers and acquaintances; that desire to hide out is recent, and expensive.