The Secret Lives of Married Women (2 page)

“Just get rid of him,” Jack urged. “Tell him you changed your mind.”

“Well,” I said. “I wish I could.”

“Why can’t you? Come on. I’ll do it cheaper and better.”

“I wouldn’t feel right about it. He came all the way out here. But look,” I said. I realized that for some reason I was anxious to appease him. “There’s a lot more work we want done on this house. Our daughter’s room was just the first thing. We want to strip the wallpaper in another room and paint that one too, and rip up some carpet and put down wood floors...”

When I brought the painter into the house, Jack came along so he could see what I wanted done. I showed him the alcove on the western side of the house, which was covered with garish electric-blue wallpaper. I thought that with a few adjustments, it would be ideal as a nursery for the baby due in November.

“Ah,” he said. “The gun room.”

“What?”

“This is the gun room. It’s where Walt kept his rifles.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, we’d like to make it a nursery now.”

He had named his hundred-dollar price for the paint job on the spot, so now I tried to get an idea of how much he’d want to do other things. But here he became evasive, saying he charged by the hour and it was impossible to know how long such jobs would take.

“Like you never know what you’re going to find under that wallpaper,” he told me.

I went over to the wall and ripped off a long strip. “Well, here. Take a look,” I said. I added that I didn’t like to pay by the hour. “In general,” I said, “jobs seem to take a whole lot longer when there’s an hourly rate instead of a flat fee.”

“Oh, hey, I don’t screw around,” he protested. “I get it done.”

I didn’t point out that at this very moment he was presumably on the clock of the owner next door while chatting me up.

“At the least,” I said, “I’d need to know that a job wouldn’t exceed a certain amount.”

He looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, and I realized we were already on somewhat adversarial terms. I began to feel sorry I’d started talking with him at all.

“Well, look, I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” I said.

Instead of responding to this, he tilted his head and squinted at me. “You know,” he said finally. “I think I’ve seen you someplace before.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We were in Portland for a year before buying this house, so if you get down there much...” But I didn’t believe he’d really seen me before; I didn’t even think that
he
believed it. It was just something men said to get information.

* * *

It was true that we’d spent the last year renting a house in Portland. But when we were ready to buy, we were drawn to Vancouver, just across the Columbia River and the Washington state line. Here we were amazed by what we could afford: the lush green lawn and two-car garage, the split-level layout and vast kitchen. We loved the great room’s vaulted ceiling and rough-hewn wooden beams, the floor-to-ceiling fireplace constructed of river rock. For all this, we were willing to overlook the neighborhood’s lack of charm, its absence of continuous sidewalks, and the fact that the area seemed to be all strip malls and chain stores.

It would be an adjustment, Stas and I kept saying to each other. Like the many other adjustments we’d made in such swift and recent succession. Stas had moved in with me after our second date and we’d married within the year. I was pregnant six weeks later, and we left New York City for the west coast a few months into the pregnancy. It was hard to leave Manhattan but even harder to imagine having children there: too expensive, too crowded, an endless hassle. If we stayed put, we told each other time and again, our kids would never get to play in the yard. In Manhattan, there were no yards.

Portland was full of yards, and there seemed to be two cats and a rosebush in every one of them. We rattled off the city’s virtues to our friends back east: kind and gentle, laid back and easy, progressive and affordable and child-friendly. Portland offered easy access to the ocean, the mountains, the national forests and the desert. It was full of independent bookstores and galleries and museums.

Beneath all this was something harder to articulate: a certain ramshackle charm, an enchanted quality about even the modest houses and streets. Many of the homes brought the word
cottages
to mind, with their shingled sides and pitched roofs and smoking chimneys. Wildflowers were a fixture in almost every yard, and porches were often elaborately furnished, with porch swings and baby swings, rugs and chairs and end tables, prayer flags or paper lanterns. Little artisanal touches were everywhere: rectangles or diamonds of colored glass set into a wooden fence, roses trained painstakingly over a trellis, a mosaic of ceramic and china shards embedded in the cement of someone’s front steps. Alleys crisscrossed the serene neighborhoods, and they could be mistaken for little country lanes with their hawthorn and honeysuckle and dirt paths worn smooth.

The only drawback was that so many others were in sudden agreement about Portland’s allure. Even as the real estate market was taking a hit across the nation, the housing prices there were skyrocketing. The other outposts of the city made Vancouver seem appealing. So here we were, first-time buyers with a home of our own. And I was having a room painted, because I could.

When I returned to the house later that afternoon to pay for the job, Jack appeared in the driveway again.

“Listen, I’ll come up with a fair price to give you guys,” he said. “I thought about what you were saying, and I get where you’re coming from.”

I told him I appreciated this. “There were just so many expenses involved in buying the house. More than we realized. So we want to rein in the spending for a while.”

“Yeah, no, I get it,” he repeated. “And like I said, I’ll work out something you can live with.”

I recounted this exchange to Stas when he came home from work. “So, you know, already it’s awkward,” I said. “I all but offered him this work, but he wouldn’t say how much he’d want for it.”

We were in the stripped living room of our Portland rental, sitting on boxes and eating takeout burritos on paper plates. Clara’s crib had been dismantled and she was asleep in the Pack ’n Play.

“Why did you even start talking to him?” my husband asked, irritated. “Why didn’t you wait to see if the painter would show up? You are too impatient.”

“He started talking to me,” I said.

“You should learn not to be so friendly.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Stas gave me a hard look and said nothing further.

I shouldn’t have married him
, I thought for perhaps the hundredth time.

* * *

“Don’t feel bad,” Rae said a little later that evening, upon hearing the same story. She had come to drop off some house keys that Walt forgot to give us: one for the side door, another for the garage. “Your back was against the wall by then. You had one day to get the job done!”

I was happy to see Rae. Her loud pronouncements always gave me a lift.

“It’s not like you would’ve had time for a comparison shop if the first guy never showed,” she added.

“Well, exactly,” I said.

“Just make him name his price before he starts. You’re smart to want a flat fee. And listen, once you’re settled in, we need to grab a drink. Maybe the middle of next week?”

* * *

The following morning, an unseasonably hot morning in May, we arrived at the house with our U-Haul in tow. My twin sister Lillian and her husband Darren were already parked out front; they had flown in from New York to help us move, and from here they would drive up to Canada to see Darren’s father. “Look at that. Darren’s rental,” Stas said. “Is that a Mercedes...?”

This was something I never would have noticed. I could be close with someone for years and never notice what they drove, beyond a vague sense of its shape and possibly its color. Whereas Stas kept a vehicular inventory of his every casual acquaintance: the brand, the make, the year, how many miles it would get to the gallon.

Lillian emerged from the car: a lean and angular woman in faded blue jeans and a t-shirt, her dark hair swept back and held by a simple clip. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup: a slimmer, sensible version of me.

“It’s lovely, Leda!” she said. “Look at your new yard. What a beautiful tree, and how great that there’s a swing.”

“Thanks so much for coming.” We hugged hard and I breathed in her scent of laundered cotton and herbal shampoo. Over her shoulder I watched as Stas and Darren shook hands. “You’re renting in style. Stas is very impressed.”

“Oh, it’s ridiculous. You’d think we could do without a luxury car for a week-long road trip. But you know Darren.”

Darren and Lillian had met in law school. He was now a senior associate specializing in mergers and acquisitions at Skadden, Arps. Lillian was a defense attorney and a partner in her own firm. They had been trying to have children for a long time and for that reason, I’d put off telling Lillian I was pregnant again. But now she tentatively touched my swelling belly.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “Are you...?”

I gripped her hand in both of mine. “I am.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “That’s
wonderful,”
she said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Oh, Lily. I just wanted to wait until after the first trimester. You know how it is.”

“How far along are you?”

“Thirteen weeks. I was going to tell you this weekend, honestly. I wanted to tell you in person.”

“That’s just so wonderful, honey. I’m so happy for you.” A little abruptly, Lillian turned to peer into the backseat of our car. She kept her face averted as she lifted Clara out and made a breathless, affectionate fuss over her. “Sweetie-pie, hi! I’m so glad to see you. I missed you so much!”

Inside the house, my sister and her husband exclaimed over the dramatic fireplace and the kitchen’s rustic charm. I went to the sink to refill my water bottle but when I turned the faucet, nothing happened.

“What the hell,” Stas said. I stepped into the laundry alcove and tried that sink too. The water was off.

It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Stas called the water department and got a recorded message. I called Rae and got her voicemail. Walking down our new driveway to the U-Haul, I thought about three days with no working sinks, showers, or toilets.

“Hey, what’s the trouble?”

I looked up to see Jack grinning at me from the next yard.

“You look like someone pissed in your cornflakes,” he said.

I told him about the water. He stepped away from his pail of plaster and wiped his hands on his pants. “Maybe I can give you a hand. Let me take a look.”

He followed me back to the house, where I introduced him to everyone else. Then he disappeared into the basement. When he resurfaced a few minutes later, the water was back on.

We all exclaimed with relief. My unease of the day before was replaced by gratitude. How lucky that I’d met Jack! We invited him to grab a bagel and cream cheese from the breakfast spread on the kitchen island. He dug in without hesitation. He seemed to be in no hurry to leave.

Eventually Stas and I turned to the task of hauling boxes into different rooms while Jack lingered over his third cup of coffee, talking to Darren.

“You see, Stas,” I said, as we unpacked linen and quilts and clothing in our new bedroom. “It’s a good thing I met Jack after all. Otherwise we’d have no water till Tuesday.”

“He really knows this house,” Stas conceded.

* * *

“Listen,” said Lillian when we were alone later, drinking green tea at the kitchen table. “I know you’re mostly a stay-at-home mom right now, but if you’re interested in a one-time paying job that you can do at your convenience, a client of mine just told me about a project that might intrigue you. It won’t pay much, of course.”

“What is it?”

“Well, he’s blind and affiliated with all kinds of advocacy groups. Apparently one of them received an endowment for the purpose of creating an audio library of poetry.”

She drew a slender hardcover from her purse. The title was
Different Hours;
the poet’s name was Stephen Dunn.

“Whether or not you’d like to record for them, I think you would love this,” she said. “It won a Pulitzer. Anyway, have a look at it and let me know whether you’d like to be a reader. You’d be recording all the poems for around seventy-five dollars.”

I took the book without opening it. “It was nice of you to think of me, Lily.”

“Do you ever think of trying out for any local theater?”

“Yeah, there are a million parts for pregnant women.”

Right away, I regretted saying this. Lillian held her teacup with both hands and stared into the pale green liquid without answering.

“I’m sorry, Lil,” I said after a moment. “It’s just—acting is not a part of my life anymore, and I’m okay with that.”

“All right.”

I felt my throat tighten.

“What’s that sound?” my sister asked suddenly.

“What sound?”

“Listen,” she said, and then I heard it: something like a trickle of rain, but coming from inside the house. As we rose to investigate, Stas and Darren wandered up from the basement where they’d been flattening empty boxes; they had heard it too. The guest room ceiling was leaking. A steady stream of water splashed from the rafters and pooled on the floor. As I ran to get a mop and bucket, it came to me for the first time that there was no landlord to handle this, no building manager to call.

“I can’t believe it. On our very first night!” I said to Stas. “How much did we pay for that inspection? No one said anything about a leak!”

“Welcome to home ownership,” my brother-in-law said.

* * *

But lying in bed a little later, I was bone-tired and deeply pleased. I loved the house. The yard had space enough for a swing set and sandbox. There was a lovely wooden side porch between the house and the garage. And come winter, a fire would blaze inside the stone hearth.

“How’s about you haul boxes around today, and I’ll spend time bonding with my niece,” Darren suggested to Lillian the next morning.