Oaxaca had been a turning point for Mark. Coming up the jet bridge at Newark behind Harris and his engorged suitcase, he’d felt that he was walking against a reverse magnetic current. The car service had picked them up and squired them back into this softest pocket of the continent, this deepest pouch of forgetfulness. They had closed the door of their house, unloaded their bags, and re-canopied themselves in the safe tarpaulin of their lives.
Since then, Mark has suffered from a dissonant feeling, something like the antipathy of adolescence. He remembers the first time he’d been nettled like this: during a childhood trip to Jamaica, when his family had driven through a shantytown, past cornrowed, bright-uniformed children walking barefoot on the side of the road—and his mother had locked the car doors.
“Oh yes, my partner and I discovered this beauty on our trip to Brittany in ’95,” Harris is saying, stroking the top of a cherry demilune table.
He pronounces “my partner” without any meaningful beat. Mark does not look up from the box of insects. Harris is in his tangerine polo shirt today, the one he thinks makes him look preppy and straight, but which has become conspicuously tight across his belly. It seems impossible that he hasn’t noticed this, and yet there is no kind way to point it out.
While they are triangulating the demilune table, Mark slips out the back door for a cigarette. He feels an urge to call Camille, to hear her sardonic voice, something salted to neutralize the gush of self-congratulation in the showroom.
He calls, tells her about the box of bugs, plays up the bitchiness for her benefit.
“Oh, I remember those,” Camille sings. “This old man glued them all over his neighbor’s house. It was supposed to be an avant-garde installation but it turned into a big scandal. People said it was bringing down property values.”
“Of course. Well, at least they’re on consignment.” Mark pulls on his American Spirit, the mellow varietal, a half-stride toward quitting.
“Are you smoking?”
Mark exhales. “God, you people. So what?”
“Just asking. Go ahead if you want.”
Camille had been the first to leave the city. Mark and Harris followed later the same year—in the midst of the Wall Street encampments, the haphazard arrests—and joined her in the same cosmically quaint town an hour north on the train line. What incredible fortune, they agreed, that life should have washed them on this same high rock together. They would throw scandalous parties, now on ambrosial back patios rather than spongy rooftops, more Gatsby than Bright Lights. Then Camille gave birth, got divorced. Mark and Harris had never really liked her husband and toasted her freedom with a bottle of Cristal, but frolicsome times had not followed. Instead, over the course of the past year, Camille seems to have pulled away, succumbing to the plague of insecurity that besets all single women alike. Her foray into Internet dating has become something heavy, secretive. She no longer calls Mark with stories that make him laugh until he wheezes.
Harris appears in the doorway. Mark hangs up, stubs his cigarette.
“Come in,” Harris stage-whispers, “I want to introduce you to these people.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just come in.”
Inside, the customers are smiling expectantly.
“Mark, this is Gretchen and Caspar Von Mauren.”
Gretchen. Not what Mark would have guessed.
“They just bought one of those gorgeous old homes on Cannonfield and are looking for a designer.”
“It’s a bit of a mess right now,” Gretchen says in a voice that is surprisingly deep. “But we have big renovation plans. Harris tells us this is something you do?”
Immediately, Mark feels exposed. Most likely he is the same age as these people, but inside he is still a boy, a student.
“Yes,” he says as casually as he can, “and I especially enjoy working with historic homes.”
“How serendipitous!” the woman pronounces, glancing at her gay German husband. “I’m so glad we came in today. You never know who you’ll meet. Well, Mark, could we ask you to come by one day and have a look?”
Mark glances at Harris, who is smiling paternally at him.
“Of course. Which house is it?”
“Four-thirty Cannonfield.”
Mark pretends to think, pulls out his phone, pretends to check his calendar.
“They’re taking the olla pot and the demilune table. They put cash down on the spot.”
“That’s great.”
“I had a feeling when they walked in. You know how sometimes you can just tell? I knew by the guy’s shirt, the French cuffs, that he was all business. And the way the woman’s eyes scanned around, quick like an eagle. She’s had practice.”
“Like an eagle sighting its prey.”
“What? Why do you always have to mock everyone?”
“Who’s mocking? I just didn’t see anything so special about them. Also, I drove by the house. It’s a disaster.”
“So what? You don’t have to deal with the outside.”
Mark doesn’t answer. It’s true that he hasn’t been hired for a big project in years. In a recession, even the eternal clamor for interior design is muted. Only high-end firms with physical showrooms can expect to thrive. So he’s been spending more time at the store, helping with bookkeeping and inventory.
“It’s perfect timing,” Harris continues. “You’ll probably finish up by next summer, just in time to go somewhere. We still need to do Africa. I was thinking Tanzania.” Harris pauses. “While we’re there, maybe we could go on a safari.”
Mark’s lips tighten. A safari will mean staying in a luxury lodge, surrounded by primitive villages with no access to clean water. It will mean dropping enough money to feed one of those villages for a year, in exchange for the indulgence of looking at wild animals that would prefer not to be looked at. He has no interest in feeling like a descended extraterrestrial again, touching ground just long enough to take something.
“I don’t mind going to Tanzania,” he pronounces carefully, “but only if we can stay in a village and do something useful.”
“Oh, honey.” Harris stares for a moment, smiling, as if at a child who has said something amusing. “You’re not serious, are you?”
Mark is quiet. It is at times like these when he feels their age difference most sharply, feels a returning undertow of regret like a soft tug in his gut. It is at these moments, unbalanced and vulnerable, that Seth sweeps back to him in a flood, like a mythical ocean creature. No future there, no destination. It would have been like riding a sea horse, dipping and diving and drowning, over and over. He was in Nairobi, last Mark heard. He was in Cairo, Marrakesh, Damascus. It’s been fifteen years. The choices that had seemed fungible, reversible, whimsical fifteen years ago have finally cemented. Time goes in only one direction; a hackneyed truth, but suddenly as dense as iron. Their bodies, young and beautiful as they were then, will never again be seen on this earth.
Mark looks at Harris, large and able. His autumn-brown eyes give the warmth of a thousand hearth fires.
“We used to talk about it, you know,” Mark reminds him quietly. “We used to talk about how important it was to give back. You agreed that maybe we could join a volunteer service someday.”
“Someday we could still do that.”
“But why not now?” Mark bleats. “Why not rent out the house and go away for a while?”
“When you say volunteer service, do you mean like the Peace Corps?”
Mark lets a beat pass. “Yes, like that. Now that we’re married, we can apply as a couple.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you know we can’t do that now. Not with the store.”
Mark doesn’t answer. He doesn’t mention that he’s begun filling out their applications for next year. He is hopeful that his architecture degree and sustainable design training might make him an at
tractive candidate. Perhaps there is a need in some far-flung outpost for environmentally responsible interiors. He imagines himself wearing a bandanna in an equatorial African village, reflooring huts with cork, lining walls with hemp board. As for Harris, his art history degree won’t count for much, but with some volunteer experience at home and language training, he might make an adequate English teacher.
“I’m not saying we should never do it,” Harris continues. “But there’s plenty of time. We’re still getting settled here, the store’s just taking off.” He pauses, then adds, “And your business is starting to blossom.”
Mark nods his head, does not argue. On the Peace Corps website, there is a whole section detailing the strain on romantic relationships for volunteers who serve without their partners. Twenty-seven months is a long time. There are many scenarios to consider before one partner should embark without the other, many eventualities to discuss before sending in a solo application.
When he and Harris were first in love, they sometimes played a game called “Deal Breaker.” What degree of sin or betrayal would make the other leave?
“What if I kissed your brother?” Mark would ask.
“What if I put up Laura Ashley drapes?” Harris would counter, laughing.
“What if I wanted a threesome with a woman?”
“What if I wore whale-print golf pants?”
It has been a long time since they’ve played “Deal Breaker.” There is a comfortable formality to their evenings now, the two of them reading in bed, a stack of books and magazines upon each nightstand, a sense that every waking moment must be squeezed for gain of further information. Mark can’t help but contrast this with their first helium weeks together, holed up in Harris’s Bond Street apartment, lightened by the exertion of talk and sex, when he wondered if he would ever read a book again.
Harris accompanies Mark on his consultation visit with the Von Maurens. Together, they drive away from the dollhouse center of town, through softer acres with gated residences hidden in the trees. It’s true that Mark loves the aesthetic refinement of this area. He loves the exquisitely restored farmhouses, the expensive masonry that makes new stone walls appear old, the blanketed show horses. He can’t help but thrill to the effortless elegance of the weathered barns, the convertible sports cars—to his sheer proximity to this most rarefied class, peppered with private film stars, financiers, icons of fashion and design. There is an aphrodisiac in this aura of informal exclusivity that is absent from the city and its brassy rivalry.
They pull up to number 430, a flat-faced white saltbox with an ugly blue tarp on the roof. The Ezekiel Slater house, according to the plaque at the side of the door, built in 1740. The date alone, Mark admits, gives him a frisson. He has never worked on anything predating the Victorian era.
Gretchen opens the plank door before he and Harris can knock, her jeweled ears and neck discordant in the rustic doorframe.
She pulls them inside and begins talking. “The elderly woman who lived here didn’t do anything to the house. I don’t think anything’s been changed for forty years.” She clips over the wood floor in snakeskin pumps. “Anyway, we interviewed designers in the city, but none of them had a feeling for the history. They wanted to do everything new. Then we had a problem with the roof, as you can see, and the historical commission got involved. So now we’re in the middle of a big exterior restoration in keeping with their guidelines. Of course that won’t affect what we do to the interior.”
Mark nods. “But you’ll want to be sensitive, regardless.”
“Of course,” Gretchen chimes. “Anyway, let me show you what we’re thinking, then you let us know if you can make it work.”
She turns away, and Mark rolls his eyes at Harris, who smirks. They follow her up the narrow staircase, its steps groaning with age. Harris trails behind, his knee joints blasted by late-stage Lyme disease. Probably picked up in the garden during their first weeks in the house, before they’d learned to wear kneesocks.
Caspar Von Mauren appears silently at the top of the staircase, an apparition in white linen. The attic would become his home office. The walls separating the two smaller bedrooms would vanish to create a master suite, and the third bedroom would become a his-and-hers bath. The kitchen pantry would morph into a powder room, and the kitchen itself would grow a glassed-in sunroom.
“The front has to stay the same, I know that. We wouldn’t want to change that.” Gretchen looks at her husband, as if for confirmation. “And I’m already picturing some of the things from the store in here. The barn-door table right here in the dining room, with the Windsor chairs around it. Also, I’d love to enlarge some of the windows in the back, get some more light in here.”
Mark makes notes on his little pad with a metal pen. He fills pages. If these people are serious about their plans, the job will take a good year.
At home, Harris opens a ’93 Dom.
Mark shakes his head. “It’s not official yet.”
“Oh, you know it is. Cheers, and kudos to me for matchmaking.”
“Thank you.”
“Come on, let’s take this to the patio.”
They sit at the wrought-iron bistro table and drink. Here it is, their home. Their dream house, a restored Victorian in a neighborhood of restored Victorians, a perfect row of painted ladies. Theirs is yellow with sage trim, a pink-iced porch ceiling. They are bookended by other marzipan confections; their flowering backyard abuts other flowering yards. Their quarter acre is bordered by a lattice-top fence flush with hydrangea bushes and honeysuckle vines. Even the name of their road—Mercy—suits this particular kind of American paradise, this miniature encapsulation of English gardenhood. This is what had appealed to them, this manageable, modest utopia, this antithesis of trashy sprawl. It pains Mark to think that he has outgrown it so quickly.
It will take over a week to prepare an estimate for the Von Maurens. Mark sits in the garden each day with his laptop, staring at the bed of snapdragons Harris has planted. His head fills with fuzz, and his breath becomes shallow. Allergies, he wants to believe.
Three days later, he has not even finished an estimate for the kitchen. Harris returns from the store at six, like any commuting husband, portly and hungry, the king of his castle.
“The Von Maurens came in today. I told them how excited you are about the project.” He grins. “They put a deposit on the Windsor chairs. When I mentioned that the woodworker lives in town, they flipped. They want him to carve their initials into the chair combs. These people love to support their local craftsmen, you know.”
“And underpaid Mexicans, too.”
“Mark, I looked them up today. Do you know who these people are?”
“Um, no?”
“Gretchen is a rubber heiress. Her father is a Texas tire baron. And Caspar is an actual baron. From Liechtenstein.”
“Ha. I knew he was German.”
“No, Liechtensteinien.”
“Oh, please.”
“I’m going to invite them for drinks.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why, Harris? What do we want with these people?”
“Honey, you need to think like a businessman. These people are top rung. They’re all over the gala pages. Your design could wind up in Town & Country.”
“God forbid.”
“Oh my God, when did you become such a snob?”
Mark opens his mouth but does not answer. It would be overly hostile to remind Harris that they’d come to this place with an understanding, a quiet contract, a shared touch of irony. They’d come as a pair of anthropologists to masquerade among the natives, or so Mark had thought, to mirror their culture and borrow from its abundance. They were not supposed to adopt it; they were not supposed to blend.
Harris opens a Bordeaux Blanc while the Von Maurens rave about the house and
everything in it. Gretchen touches the objects on the tables, picks them up, turns them in her hands. She taps the Ghost chair with a fingernail and lowers herself finally into one of the antique fauteuils, letting her fingers splay upon the saffron Bergamo upholstery. She points to the flokati ottoman that rests like a sheepdog at her feet.
“Mark’s design,” Harris trumpets.
Through the avid eyes of visitors, Mark can’t help but be pleased with their home. They have achieved an impeccable mix of new and old, sleek and textured, Mark’s eye for classic symmetry counterbalancing Harris’s more exuberant tastes. Mark has had to hold him back from too much Jonathan Adler, tempting as it is. Already, he regrets rubber-stamping the eight-by-ten Union Jack rug in the living room. It dominates, limits their options. Also, he would like to sell the third-rate Hirst spin painting that they’d bought at the height of the market, but which has lost its dimension over the years and become a flat thing.
As the swooning continues, Mark becomes resentful. Perhaps he should take their fixation on decor as a compliment to his designer’s eye, but it is edging into a presumption that he and Harris have no other interests. He tries to change the topic of conversation to something political, global. It occurs to him that a Liechtenstein baron might have something to say about the EU crisis.
“The whole endeavor was misguided from the start,” Caspar responds without expression or gesture.
“I just have to say I love your window seat there.” Gretchen points. “Is that original to the house?”
Harris opens a second bottle of wine, a third. He is glowing. This is not what Mark had pictured when he’d pictured the parties they’d have. The baron seems to be relaxing a bit, leaning back in his fauteuil. Gretchen keeps touching Harris’s arm as they talk, as if she is hungry for something.
Harris is now cherub pink. He leans in, and in a breathlessly intimate voice says, “So, tell me. Are you two youngsters thinking of having a family?”
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