The Dwelling: A Novel (5 page)

She did so tenderly, as though to make up.

The house sold the following Monday.

The couple, Dan and Rebecca Mason, were in their mid-thirties, childless, but wanting a larger home. They were a very attractive couple, although he was on the softer side of masculine and that wasn’t necessarily Glenn’s type, but she could see how very lovely his face and form were. She was tall and slender and dark and very self-assured. They both were. Glenn actually found them rather bold at first, when they separated from her (and from each other) and wandered around the house unaided. She respected confidence, of course.

For once, the whole house behaved. The back door had decided to stay put since Mr. Gretner fastened or tightened or bewitched it, the tap did not leak and, as predicted, the earth in the hole where the pillar had been had blown over, or whatever it had done, and looked less craven and conspicuous. The Waverley cairn had been picked up. By whom she did not know. She had simply put in a call to the insurers and they had had it removed.

She decided she liked them when she heard Mr. Mason scream from the room with the Murphy bed, “I
love
it! Becca, come and see!” The two women joined him in there and couldn’t help but catch his enthusiasm. The Murphy bed was pulled down and took up much of the doorway space.

“It’s so funky,” he said. Becca touched it delicately with a long, manicured finger. She was a director of some sort at a medical administrative place or something downtown. She did not say it so much as elocuted it, and Glenn wondered if it was a new promotion. Something about a health professional with long nails bothered Glenn, but she, of course, kept her poker face. Dan was a graphic artist at Clayton and Marks. The agency had used them once, Glenn had mentioned. She believed they did the Shelter logo.

“It’s my studio! Totally!” Becca looked dubious as far as Glenn could see, but she could, for the first time, smell something good in the house.

“I knew I would find someone who would appreciate that particular little gem if I waited,” Glenn said, smiling. “I have the dimensions for the mattress, if you’re interested.”

“It’s beautiful,” Becca said. The couple met eyes.

And Glenn took her cue. “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you two for a moment. Please enjoy the house, I’ve got a call to make. Do you mind?” She was bluffing, giving them a chance to get onto the same page.

She disappeared onto the front step. She called the office and chatted briefly with Elsie. She wanted to say she had a nibble, but would not for the world jinx it. She would give them ten minutes. She called her dry cleaner. Her skirts were ready. They had not been able to get a spot out of her jacket. She chewed a couple of Tums.

After ten minutes had passed, she went back inside, glad of it, the spring air crisp that morning, although the sun was warm. Already summer seemed a possibility. “Well, I’m done with my calls,” she said casually. “What can I show you?”

“How about the deed?” Mr. Mason said, grinning broadly, his arm wrapped around his wife’s waist. She smiled at her husband and laughed, a tinkly laugh.

And that was that. Howard would have been pleased.

Rebecca Mason dipped the cloth into the bucket and rinsed it in the warm water. Carefully she squeezed out the excess, and as she did, the scent of pine filled her nose. It was a good smell. Clean. She liked things to smell clean. She folded the cloth in half, and then in half again, forming a neat, hand-sized square. Then she ran it over the baseboard from the corner, an arm’s length from her, to the end of her other shoulder, precisely; in this way she kept track of where she had washed, and what was yet to be done. She repeated this, moving the bucket an equal distance each time, so that it stayed just four inches to her left. Her eyes followed the motion of the cloth, and she moved gracefully, but her thoughts were not in the yellow room at the end of the upstairs hall at all.

In her head, a cocktail party was in full swing.

Ice tinkled gently in glasses. Laughter was discreet and elegant. Conversations were quiet and thoughtful, murmurs really, in a large room, its high ceilings molded with ivy leaves intricately woven and forming an enormous circle around a giant chandelier. Crystals hung suspended in light, casting stars on the four walls surrounding it. Sometimes, instead of a chandelier, the room was lit with hundreds of tiny white lights strung on cord so fine it was invisible. Becca spent a lot of time constructing that room.

It was an old fantasy.

How do you do? I’m Rebecca Mason.
She usually wore black Armani, cocktail-length, of course, and carried a small, discreet Prada bag. Her hair differed each time, concurrent with the time of day. If it was an early-evening affair, she wore it loose. If it was later, her hair was pulled back and held fast with a clip covered in black velvet; only rarely did she wear it completely up. Her jewelry was minimal and well chosen. It also varied, tastefully.

What do you do?

If there was music, it was strictly in the background. The music in Becca’s fantasy cocktail parties was the low rumble of important voices, from the mouths of important people. Who they were in reality was less important to her than who she was in their midst. At these affairs, Becca was an equal among giants. She was a success.

How do you do? I’m Rebecca Mason. I’m the Director of Patient Services at the Center for Improved Health. We were featured in the
Atlantic
last year.

The cloth swept efficiently across the south wall, and Becca swiveled around on her bottom and repeated the process with barely a missed motion. She was nearly done. The floor had been washed, rinsed, and rinsed a second time already, early that morning. The walls had been rinsed the night before. They were clean, bright and without streaks.

It was midafternoon, and they had been in the house a week. The previous weekend had been entirely taken up with the steady and constant movement of boxes, endless boxes, more boxes than she was sure she had packed, and she had mentioned to her husband that she believed they were breeding. It had been a joke, of course, but a joke was rare enough from her that he had looked twice before laughing.

Under his breath, not more than a beat later, she had been sure she’d heard him say,
I’m glad someone’s getting it around here,
but when she asked him to repeat himself, he said, “Nothing.”

You’re very young to be a director.

Yes.

The room smelled heavily, and pleasantly, of pine forests as replicated by Johnson & Johnson. Under the pine scent was the fainter scent of oil soap; she’d used the oil soap on the floor, but had decided the baseboards required something stronger. She thought of bare feet rubbing up against them for years and years, the flesh leaving its traces, never washed off, just sitting and breeding its germs and filth; no one ever thought to wash a baseboard.

She could feel the water cooling through the thickness of her rubber gloves. Her hands were sweating under them, and would likely be puckered, but at least they would not be dry and flaky and itchy at work on Monday. It was important to keep up appearances. Under the gloves each fingernail had been carefully wrapped in cotton batting and taped with surgical tape to protect it. She’d had a manicure on Wednesday, and although she was trying very hard not to think in
those
terms, she could not afford another this month.

Intermittently, she could hear the whir of Dan’s drill from the room under the stairs, the one with the bed that folded out of the wall. The Murphy bedroom, the realtor had called it. Dan called it
the studio,
as though it were some loft in New York, instead of a room hardly bigger than a closet, hidden under the stairwell.

The drill sounded for a couple of seconds and then stopped. Becca worked her way across the last baseboard, on the east wall.

Sun poured in from the west window, making a shadow on the wall. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her own head bob and rise with each swipe of the cloth. It was probably after four already. She looked up from her work, and arched her back, stretching out from her diaphragm. She rolled her head on her neck.

They were having friends of Dan’s over for coffee.

You must be very good at what you do.

Conversations around her were of portfolios and state dinners, private schools and Senate races.

Yes.
Her dress was custom-made. In it, her breasts were high and perfect. Her stockings blended subtly from her discreet black pumps to her modest hemline, just two inches above her smooth knees.

Downstairs the drill sounded again, twice in rapid succession, as though the first attempt hadn’t quite been right and he was forcing the issue. Which was probably true. Dan wasn’t handy. The drill was his only real tool, although they had a motley collection of screwdrivers and hammers. The rest of the items in their “toolbox” were odd things that were rarely used: a large heavy file that had pried open a little crate of Christmas oranges sent to them by her mother from Florida one year; an awl that had been used to punch airholes in a jar when Dan’s nephew caught a butterfly at their old house a year earlier. Nothing matched. Nothing was particularly useful. They kept it all. Just in case.

And what does your husband do?

Sometimes in her fantasy (and more lately) she danced. Her partner would be older and urbane rather than handsome, with a mustache and a smile that seemed to know more than he gave away. She would relax in his arms, neither leaning nor leading, and yet he would almost carry her with every stride. There was an assumption of what he did for a living; it was never entirely defined in her fantasy, drifting over a multitude of occupations that were titular rather than hands-on: publisher, CEO, president, director, politico.

What does your husband do?

Becca reached the corner where she had started and gave it a last wipe. The water was murky, but not dirty. Dust floated serenely on top in little patterns. She sighed and stood up slowly so as not to bump the bucket, which was resting on a square of newspaper. She gave the room a once-over. It was remarkably yellow. The sun brightened it considerably, and there was a moment of adjustment for your eyes when the sun was at its fullest in the room. There were two windows, one south-facing that overlooked the street, and a west one, which mostly overlooked the windowless side of the neighbors’ house and the hedge that wrapped around their place. Their new house. The house that they might not be able to pay for in a couple of months, unless she made director.

She would make director.

Her heart pounded when she thought about money. To make it stop she leaned over and picked up the bucket with her rubber-gloved hands. Her fingers felt moist under the cotton batting and she would be happy to get it off. She made herself think only of these things. Becca was a very focused person. When she had a will, she could do anything.

From downstairs, Dan hollered, “Becca! Come hold the shelf!” At the sound of his voice, Becca closed her eyes. It was just for a moment, but in that moment she could feel her body turning inward on itself, away from the voice downstairs.

Becca was going to talk Dan into ordering Chinese. To do that, she needed to be sweet and accommodating.
Please, not too accommodating.
Max and Kate were coming for coffee after supper. Friends of Dan’s. Max was Dan’s new partner. Which sounded much better than the truth.

And what does your husband do?

He has a partner.

That sounds impressive.

Yes.

What do they do, these partners?

They’re making a comic book. It’s about a superhero.

Becca carried the bucket into the bathroom. Inside her head, the cocktail party changed dramatically. Gales of laughter overtook genteel conversation and elegant chuckles. She dumped the bucket into the tub and watched as the grayish liquid rolled slowly down the drain and then rinsed it efficiently before pulling off her rubber gloves. Without them her fingers looked like oversized Q-tips. She smiled at that. She peeled the tape off one nail and was pleased when no glue was left behind.

He used to be in advertising.

He won an award.

“Becca!” Dan called up again.

“I’m coming!” she called down, and took her time, unwrapping each finger slowly, lovingly, and wondering if she should have sex with him before Max and Kate came and that way get it over with for the night, or if putting it off for the evening until she had at least had a glass of wine would make it easier.

The studio, as he was calling it, was filling up fast. There was a serious lack of room, but as the boxes emptied and were put out into the hallway, it was beginning to take on a cozy feeling, as opposed to the crowded one he had briefly been afraid of at the beginning of the week. There was not much left to go inside. Once the books were unpacked and on the shelves, it would free up some floor space and he could unpack the rest of his stuff, put up the drafting table, his floor lamp (the overhead was just a bulb that cast a horrible glare over everything; it would be a disaster at night, when he was tired), and his supplies table. Then he was set. There would be just room for the bed to be pulled down (although he didn’t anticipate using it too often) and room for a bedside table. Cozy.

Next year he would put in a window on the outside wall. It would be useless for light for most of the day, being an east window, but it would be very nice in the morning. He did his best work at night anyway.

That was habit. He had always worked at night because he’d had a day job, or he’d been in classes during the day. He could work any time he wanted now, and that was both frightening and exhilarating.

For the first time in his twenty-eight years, Dan Mason was gainfully unemployed. Unless you counted college. Even then, he’d worked part-time, framing prints for people whose conception of art rarely went further than making sure it matched their sofa.

He realized too late that instead of putting the upper shelves on first he had anchored the frame to the wall and attached the lower two shelves to it, using his eye as a level (he had a great eye). The bottom three shelves were in place, and only the top one remained. But he couldn’t quite get under it. He would need Becca to hold it while he stood on a chair with the drill.

Dan shrugged and took a break, slipping out of the house into the backyard for a smoke. Becca didn’t like smoking in the house. During the day he often broke that rule, taking a few drags in his studio as he pondered or unpacked, and so far she hadn’t said much. He kept it contained in the small space and usually stopped long before she got home from work, so there was time to air the place out. When he put his window in, he was going to smoke all he wanted in there.
Secondhand smoke kills, Dan.

Not reliably.
He smiled, thinking of some line from a movie. He’d used it on her a few times, but she never got the reference. She never remembered things like movie lines, or bits of poetry or famous quotes. If you told her the reference (which spoiled using it at all), she would smile falsely and sometimes laugh, if they were in a group, but it wouldn’t reach her eyes and he would know that she didn’t get it. It was part of her charm. At least, he used to think so.

The backyard was a tangle of untended garden. He was still mildly high from a joint smoked early in the afternoon and so he imagined himself getting in there and untangling and replanting, propagating and creating something of unearthly beauty, a little Garden of Eden. He had time, after all. One afternoon when he wasn’t working, he would get out there and dig around in the dirt. It would be great. Dirt smelled great. Earthy and green. It was creation. He felt a surge of creativity that made him flick his lit cigarette to the side and wander over to the garden. He bent over, hands on knees, and stared into the tangle trying to recognize something in there. He thought he saw some columbine, some impatiens. He was no plant expert, but they were plants his mom had grown.

He stretched into the sun, squinting against it, and looked at the back of the new house. Big place. Nice big yard. Lots of atmosphere. A good place to be creative. He wished for his cigarette back and patted the pocket of his denim shirt for the pack, but he’d left it on the table by the back door. He liked a smoke while he thought.

Could use a coat of paint; roof might need work. Wouldn’t take anything at all to do and Bec wouldn’t scream about the money if he did it himself.
In his mildly stoned state he felt both capable of anything (creative) and sort of tired, like he needed a shower. It was midafternoon. Max and Kate would be there in a few hours. In a perfect world, he would have liked to have the studio all finished for when Max showed up.

And it was a perfect world. Dan was finally doing what he had been made to do. He was doing his art. At home. No more bullshit job; no more nine-to-five kissing ass.

Perfect world.

He went inside and called for Becca to come and help with the last shelf.