Building a Home with My Husband (33 page)

 

After I say bye to Jim, I change back into Hal’s clothes—now with thermal underwear beneath, both for warmth and to keep the pants up. Then I get to work. Hal’s left the radio off entirely, and the room heaves with silence. Maybe that’s good. I’ll just keep my opinions to myself and go about as I’ve been instructed, painting one more white coat on the walls.

But I’m using a roller for the first time since my terrible paint job when I was fifteen, and I’m still terrible. It keeps leaving lavender and red dots on the white wall, and dripping onto the already painted baseboards. Then I am asked to do another coat of plum on the baseboards to cover up my error. But even with a brush I’m inept. “I can’t keep to a clean line,” I say.

“Just do your best,” he replies, without his usual warmth.

Crouching here, gracelessly pantomiming a baseboard paint job, I consider slipping out to Susan and Jim’s house, though I fear I’d break down sobbing in their living room.

So I’m not looking forward to a stand-up dinner in our empty living room an hour later, and I guess Hal isn’t either, because after I hand him the salad I brought and we start eating, neither of us speaks. After a few minutes, I feel too awkward to keep saying nothing, and with no desire to arouse more tension, I attempt levity. “This is bringing out my inner oaf,” I say.

Hal just forks up another piece of lettuce.

Maybe I just have to say something funnier to get him to react. I search my thoughts to come up with additional self-deprecation, but something else slips between my lips instead.

“You know,” I say, “you’ve become a different person yourself in the last few weeks.”

“How?” he says, taken aback.

I guess I have to follow up now. Love and commitment, after all, speak. “You’re not smiling much. You’re actually being quite stern.”

He eats his salad.

I say, “Maybe this is just how you are when you’re at the office, so I’ve never seen this part of you and I just need to get used to it.”

“I don’t paint for a living.”

“You work with deadlines and the physical world. Maybe you need to be stern for that.”

He takes another bite of salad. I look at my food, and feel as if I barely fit into my body. I say, “Jim talked about the place lifting him up. It
is
nice—I realized that when he was over. It’s
fun
being here. Do you feel that way?”

“It stopped being fun for me long ago. At this point I just want it to be over.”

Time to give up this line of conversation. I ask him to fill me in on his day.

He tells me, wearily, that his office was required to attend a special seminar, one of those occasional workplace requirements devoted to making office life better.

“What was the topic?” I say, pulling teeth.

“Conflict resolution.”

I laugh and say, “That’s what you and I need.”

He looks away. “The fact is that I’m stressed out and I’m not handling it well.”

I wonder if he means the skipped meals, the lack of sleep. I say, “What do you mean?”

“I’m not treating you as well as I should be, and that’s what matters.”

Suddenly we’re folding into each other’s arms and leaning in to each other. And as our breathing moves together again, his chest in to mine and mine in to his, I know that, although these walls can’t speak, many other fights must have happened right in this room. If only this house could tell us all that it’s seen. If only we could learn the ways of love and commitment that those before us worked out through their own lives then we might not stumble so hard, and so long, and so many times. I know the stories are right here, all around us. If only we were able to listen.

I pull out of the hug and say, “I’m terrible at painting. At anything with building.”

“It’s true. You are.”

“But I want to help. I want to take away some of your stress.”

“So stop painting.”

“Will that be less stressful to you?”

“Yes.”

“But what else can I do?”

“Bring me dinner while I’m here every night, and bring my work clothes.”

“But I don’t cook. I toss salad.”

“Just make me canned soup and salad. That’ll be fine.”

“It seems like such a meager contribution.”

“Why not just say we’re a great team? I’ll do what I’m good at, and you’ll do what you’re good at. You can bring food and clothes—and iron my shirts back at the rented house.”

“I’m not good at ironing, either.”

“But you’re not terrible at it.”

“That’s correct.”

“So you do what you’re not terrible at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and it will work.”

He’s right. This formula—taking actions that not only respect our differences, but accept our different proficiencies—succeeds. Over the next week, while Hal lays a cork floor on the third story, I bring dinner. While I iron twenty-seven of his shirts in the rented house, he builds shelves. While I go to the supermarket and stock up on his favorite soups, he corrects the paint I applied poorly. While he has a final job meeting with Dan, I pick up his evening coffee.

That weekend, our last before the move, on the morning before what the news predicts will be the biggest snowstorm of the season, I paint once more on the third floor. It is something I can’t mess up: rolling white over the failed experiment of the red-sponged lavender. This time, Hal bought a new roller, so the color spots are gone. This time, too, the radio is playing Beatles love songs, in honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day. And while Hal sands and drills and whistles harmony, I sing. At dusk, I produce a thermos of hot lentil soup and the nicest salad I can put together. We stand in the empty living room eating and talking and laughing, friends and allies once again; and I glance toward the stairs. There lies his winter coat, which was lost in plain view, and will now keep him warm in the storm. “Here it comes,” he says, pointing. I turn toward the hundred-year-old window frames, which have witnessed untold friendships and romances and marriages and communities as they’ve splintered apart, and maybe, if they were lucky and willing, constructed ways to come back together. I wish the windows could tell me what they’ve seen, and how, two by two, we can make the world a more agreeable place. We need all the good ideas we can get. But the windows can give only a reflection of us, doing what each of us does well, or at least doesn’t do terribly—and enjoying each other again. I look past the reflection into the outside. Single crystals of snow are drifting down. It won’t be long until they thicken, and fall closer together, and white out the blackness of the sky.

W·R·A·P·P·I·N·G U·P

Tuesday, February 14
2:00 P.M.:

T
hree days until the renovation is complete, and I have become a feral monster. I hate everyone, except Hal.

I hate Verizon, the megacorporation that provides our phone and Internet service. I’ve made at least eight calls to them over the last month to transfer service from the rented house to Teacher’s Lane, with each call lasting nearly an hour, some disconnecting without warning. Today—my last day before my trip to Orlando—I pour two hours into more calls until I finally shriek that they should just kill the phone and Internet service at the rented house
now.
So my phone will go dead in the next few minutes, while I’m in the middle of a frenzy of renovation-related calls and Hal needs to reach me and I’m working out my itinerary with the university in Orlando.

I hate our cats. Zeebee and Peach are agitated, leaping into and out of boxes, knocking things over, attacking each other, requiring attention I have no time to give.

I hate the people I’m speaking for in Orlando. They didn’t even start making my flight arrangements and scheduling my class visits until a week ago. So I don’t have a guaranteed seat on my flight down—or time during my all-day campus visit for meals.

I hate Sparky and Torch, for igniting the delay that made us move this week instead of at the far more convenient time of Christmas.

I hate the burglar who kicked this whole thing into action in the first place.

I hate human frailty because yesterday, Rosalie called to say that the cold Gordon has been fighting since Christmas is still holding on, so they won’t come to see me while I’m down there and I can’t come to see them. After all I went through with Hal and that lighthouse, I won’t even see her. I only wish that last week, when I’d called to make sure that everything was still on track before my hosts made my flight reservations, and I suggested that Gordon might feel better if we skipped it and I didn’t fly in a day early after all, Rosalie hadn’t insisted that we not only stick to our plan but also that I take the earliest flight possible so we could have even more time together. I only wish that when she called to cancel, she’d made some tiny acknowledgment that tomorrow, on a day when Hal would much prefer me to be here, I’ll be rising at five thirty a.m. to catch a flight with no guaranteed seat to reach Orlando a day early to see no one.

I hate myself for hating everyone, especially my mother, who is old and in decline. I hate myself for wasting my life as a writer rather than becoming a lawyer or dermatologist or someone with a real income who could therefore have faced the payments for this once-in-a-lifetime renovation without them adding up to apoplexy. But instead the cost has grown by another $11,000 and Hal has made a list of other must-haves that come to $5,000, for a grand sum of $187,000, and now that we have the total we definitely have to refinance the house to keep from breaking open our IRAs, and it is the refinance guy I’m waiting to hear from. I don’t want a bigger mortgage for thirty years, but what choice do we have when I am teaching students I love at a college that won’t hire me full-time yet I put in full-time hours and even graded papers today and anyway if they did pay me full-time wages it still would take years to replenish our bank account and how the heck are we going to pay off a house with a mortgage double the size of the mortgage we have now and not be done until Hal’s eighty-four?

And Hal? I don’t hate Hal because I don’t see Hal. He’s working constantly on the house. Well, yes, I hate Hal, too, because I realized a whole week ago, before it had gone in, that the vestibule floor should not be the red linoleum he specced, but the blue we have in the bathroom, so it won’t clash with the berry-purple door. He agreed, and said he’d bring it up with Dan, but kept forgetting, because Dan’s workers and all the subs are swarming the house at this point, making sure everything gets done by Friday, February 17—when, a few hours before our moving van pulls up, the inspector is scheduled to give, or deny, the Certificate of Occupancy—and there were just so many details for Hal to think about, along with the third floor, etc., that by the time he finally remembered to leave a note for Dan about the floor, Kevin had already laid the red, and now the tiny vestibule is a phone booth of color.

I hate myself, again, for hating Hal for being too overwhelmed to tell Dan to do something as trivial as change the color of a floor.

I say all this hatred in a scream. I am screaming into the phone at a friend who had the temerity to call minutes before Verizon sends my phone into a coma, and got thanked for her effort by getting trapped in my anger pyre.

Then I pack. Last summer I gently sorted out the necessities from the mementos. Now I hurl everything into boxes. There’s no time for thought. The universe is conspiring to deprive me of my senses. Renovation is not renewal. It is annihilation.

 

 

5:30 P.M.:

Late in the day, leaving our temporary neighborhood for one last trip to bring Hal his work clothes and dinner, I see one of the neighbors from a few houses down. She waves to me on the street, and as she crosses a mound of snow to ask how we’re doing, I show my gratitude by sounding off. She listens with an odd smile, then says, “Maybe some good will come out of this.” I have no patience for Swedenborgian piffle, so I say, “I bet it will,” and then sound off some more. Finally she says, “Well, I think it means something.” “It means nothing,” I respond. She says, “I think it means that this neighborhood doesn’t want to let you go.”

The thought is so sweet and giving in the face of my rant that I laugh. “That’s nice,” I say, almost crying as she waves good-bye.

The spell is broken. I drive to the house. The monster has returned me to me.

 

 

Wednesday, February 15
12:30 P.M.:

My plane lands in sunny Orlando, and as I retrieve my carry-on from the overhead bin, I remember the early hours this morning. I rose at five thirty in the dark. Hal got up then, too, neither of us having slept much, as we have not for weeks. We can’t—either because of a deficit of time or a surplus of anxiety. We, like Dan’s crew, are going constantly: as I showered today, Hal resumed packing; as I ate breakfast and he showered, I labeled more boxes with color-coded dots. It’s a failed system, though. We have too few colors for the number of rooms in the old house, and anyway, we keep forgetting which colors mean what. Is pink my study or his studio? Blue the kitchen or bathroom? I affixed dots anyway. Meaninglessness was not enough reason to stop.

Outside, in the snowdrifts left from the weekend storm, Hal helped me load my bags into my car. He was in a suit, ready for an important meeting at the office today, which, because he took off tomorrow and Friday for the move, is his final day in the office for the week, so he’ll be frantically tying up loose ends until the moment he leaves. Then, late this afternoon, he’ll race home, hastily change into work clothes, and, with half his team off to the minor leagues, probably not sleep for two days. We were polite as we closed my trunk, but were so worn out from exhaustion, obligation, and the determination to make our move-in deadline that we did not speak. Finally, employing a term that, I hoped, would show me to be attuned to the same stresses as he, I asked, “Do you think we’ll get the Certificate of Occupancy?” “Dan says we will,” Hal said. “But do you think we’ll make it?” “I can’t think about it at all. That’s his job,” he said.