“To renovate the whole house as soon as school ends, after your graduation,” Martin said, and Joan’s mouth dropped.
She was thinking of a trip somewhere to celebrate, to India, if she could convince Martin that vacations on Caribbean islands should be a thing of the past, that this birthday required an adventure, a challenge, an unexpressed opportunity for her finally, all these years later, to go where she wanted to go, even if it was his birthday. And if that was refused, which was likely, then a week in New York. Iger could set them up with reservations at the chic restaurants she still went to, arrange tickets for them to the off-Broadway shows she thought worth seeing. A lot of time away together, or a little, either way, they could use it.
But this—she was not expecting this. Not at all. Not ever, and not this coming summer when she was hoping to finish Words. Not this summer when both boys, at last, for the first time, would be gone: Eric at the computer camp, and Daniel, after graduation, knocking around the country with two friends, setting up their tents in national parks from coast to coast, home in time for Joan to pack him up, for the Mannings to take a road trip to deliver him to the University of Pennsylvania for swim team tryouts before school began.
Joan had been dreaming of an entirely empty house, counting on those summer months. Her own future was beginning to feel tantalizingly near. She had written another hundred pages, five new first-draft chapters, and she was getting close, she could feel it in her spine, in the electricity that sparked her fingers when she touched the finished pages, when the vibration of the typewriter keys entered her being as new words and sentences and paragraphs found their way onto paper. She was writing voluptuously.
Eric’s brows met in the middle. “What happens to my room, to my computer?” he said, and Daniel said, “I don’t get it, a new house when I’m leaving?”
“Eric, we’ll make sure everything is protected, and Daniel, this is always your home. It’s where you grew up, the place you can always come back to. It will just look entirely different. And there would be so much space. Space we’ve never had,” was what Martin said.
To Joan, he said, “I’ve really thought it through and I think it’s the perfect time. I’ve already talked to an architect. Actually, I’ve done more than that. Come with me.”
They left their half-eaten dinners on the table and followed him into the living room. He pulled a long tube from a cabinet, uncorked it, tapped out what was inside—a set of architectural plans. Three that fit on top of each other: Floor plans, section plans, exterior elevations. He spread them out on the floor.
“So this is what I’m thinking,” he said. “This is what I want as my birthday present.”
The plans showed a soaring structure of angles and space and voluminous rooms with huge windows that would flood the whitewashed place with light, bring the seasons inside, unlike the small windows the house currently sported, that palled the interior in the deadness of winter. The square footage of the new space would more than quadruple their small house, everything still on one floor. She saw perfectly planned rooms identified by names that did not adequately encapsulate what she was looking at: a massive kitchen, a formal dining room, a sky-lighted living room, a study, den, and library, each with built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases surrounding the large floor-to-ceiling windows, the boys’ new large bedrooms had their own bathrooms, and Joan and Martin’s bedroom would be a real master, no longer the same size as their children’s, three times as large as the other large bedrooms, a huge space of their own, with an en suite bathroom, two sinks, separated shower and tub, and an interior room that housed matching walk-in closets.
Martin could not often still surprise her, but he had.
“What do you think?” he said to Joan.
She had never thought about a new house, did not need a new house, a new house would get in the way of her plans. She had bought this house and the land when Martin was still paying for his medical school education, but since then, he had taken excellent financial care of them all, the continued earnings from her books were in her own separate account, and although she selfishly wanted to douse his wish entirely, what else could she do but take a seat on the floor, put a finger on two of the walls of the proposed master bedroom overlooking their expansive property, the flower and vegetable gardens, the red maples, the elms, the pear trees, and in the distance, the knoll and the glen, and say, “Would it be possible to make those walls glass? Sliding glass doors, wall-to-wall glass?”
“Why not?” Martin said, smiling at her, grabbing her hand.
“And look at this, everyone,” he said, pointing to a spot on the plans. “This is the knoll where we used to put the Slip ’N Slide, and this is the glen where you guys used to read books, and this is what I was thinking, we put a pool in the glen at the same time we renovate the house. You can swim again, Joan, if you want to, and Daniel, you’ll always have a place to swim when you come home. Maybe we’ll make it a saltwater pool. We can keep it heated year-round, swim when it’s snowing. How great would that be?”
If this was a midlife crisis, it was better than those the Pregnant Six said their own husbands were experiencing—the growing of mustaches, of beards, the suddenly popular Caesar haircut, so awful with the hair brushed forward, short bangs fringing wide foreheads, ears pierced and strung with small silvery hoops, the purchases of the muscle cars of their youth, the motorcycles they had coveted but never owned. She hadn’t heard who might have stepped beyond their marital bonds, perhaps dallied with some nubile young woman two decades south of their ages, but that was typically part of the crisis. Martin had a new acquaintance at the hospital, a plastic surgeon named Larry Sumner, whose second wife was that nubile young thing, Miranda of the golden skin. Larry had left DC for Rhome, opened a new practice after his divorce, brought Miranda with him to the small and charming town. Miranda herself was not small, but very, very tall, some kind of graphic designer, and gorgeous.
Joan looked at Martin. Still so handsome, his dark hair just silvering along the edges, in good shape though he did nothing physical on any kind of consistent basis. All those nurses at the hospital, the women passengers on the planes that took him to all those countries where he shared his surgical expertise, operating on people in need, the flight attendants in their tight uniforms serving him his meals, bringing him drinks, though he said he never drank on the plane—how could he not indulge every so often as he told his tales of medical glory to his female seatmates and the women paid to be kind, attentive, adoring to first-class passengers like Martin—the chipper, shiny girls checking him in at the hotels he stayed at, asking whether he was alone, asking perhaps if he might want company for dinner, all the women fans garnered during his many recent appearances on live news programs in New York, discussing neuro-ocular medical breakthroughs, a result of the published article about him in Time. She had not, until this moment, considered the sheer number of women who might eagerly desire to be with him—his good looks, his good brain, his specialized fame potent allures. She had not, until that moment, considered how much time Martin had at his disposal for extramarital flings.
He and the boys were talking, their heads bowed over the architectural plans, and she thought again about how even Time had kept her the nameless wife. The young magazine journalist had been lazy, or perhaps held some antiquated notion that a woman, no matter her own accomplishments, was only a support in the background, for he had failed entirely to learn who she was. Hundreds of articles had been written about her and her prizewinning collections, including two in Time itself, and if the journalist had only lightly scratched the surface, he would have been inundated with material. She had not needed personal approbation in an article focused on Martin’s work, but in Time she was not even a cipher, just a ghost, and for a day or two it had annoyed her. A worse outcome would have been if she were identified as the once very famous writer who was now the longtime wife of the increasingly famous doctor. She would have loathed that. Better to be the ghost.
Martin caught her eyes, and she thought how disappointed all those women must be when their attempts to interest him in a covert drink, meal, or seduction failed. Joan knew his attention would never wander, for she possessed what Martin did not: detachment. The years had weakened it, but the remnants still clinging to her insides allowed her to do her work in private, as a secret. Perhaps that’s why she did not worry about what Martin did in his downtime in those exotic countries, or when he was in New York on his own, or stayed overnight at Rhome General: she could keep a secret and he never could.
If this house was what Martin wanted, so be it. She could not manufacture righteous indignation about the way his desire would skew her own private plans when he worked so hard and had accomplished so much in his professional life. She paid no attention to their bank accounts, to their 401(k)s, to the investment accounts he maintained in his and Joan’s names, to the college funds he had set up for the boys. She briefly glanced at the totals on their joint tax returns, then signed. He was entitled to this upheaval if the finished product would give him pleasure. But she knew she would be the one marshaling it through.
She felt for a moment that she were eighteen years in the past, working so arduously on The Sympathetic Executioners, wanting to finish that first novel before Daniel came along and stole her time, wanting her first novel to predate the first child. She had failed then, but she would not fail this time. The boys would be gone this summer, and she would figure out how to keep writing regardless of the sudden construction, would finish the novel before their return.
She would not—not yet—imagine that September might include excitement beyond Eric’s final year of middle school, beyond Daniel turning into a college freshman, the building of the new house, that the school year would bring her a transition of her own.
And it was true, aside from her suggestion that their bedroom be enclosed in glass walls, it was the house she would have built, resituated to take maximum advantage of the land, to do justice to the gardens lushly blooming from early spring, the vistas brought inside, made a part of the structure. It was the house she would have designed, had Martin asked her in advance, brought her into his plans.
* * *
She wrote vigorously until early May and then resumed all of her motherly duties. Shopping for graduation presents for Daniel, and the clothes and toiletries and the millions of other small things that Eric needed for computer camp, that Daniel required for his cross-country trip, helping them both pack for their time away, beginning to pack what Daniel would take to college. After Daniel’s graduation, that awkward party thrown by the Pregnant Six, which the Mannings attended: “The kids have known each other practically since birth, they ought to be sent off together,” Carla, Dawn, and Teresa had said. The three Manning men spent a weekend ferrying furniture and everything else the boys and Joan and Martin did not require for the coming months into a rented storage unit outside of town. Until they left, Daniel and Eric wanted to sleep in sleeping bags out on the grass, if the warm temperatures held.
On the morning of the boys’ departures, Joan’s car was out front, packed up with Eric’s suitcases, a box of computer stuff he had been working on, a bag of his favorite candy, a couple of nickels within; and Daniel’s backpacks were at the front door, ready to be thrown into the backseat of Martin’s car, later hefted through forests, carried along trails. He had packed light, taking only one book about the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. He told Joan he would tear out the chapters as he finished them. “People always leave books behind when they camp, so I’m sure I’ll find others.” It was the first time Joan knew him to choose nonfiction over a great big novel.
“Everyone, out into the backyard,” Martin commanded, checking his watch, and they left the breakfast dishes on the table, and filed out the back door. The sun was high, the day warm, the sky a blue sheet, except for one puffy, square white cloud in the distance, like the insistent base of an exclamation point.
Through the side gate came a large bald man wearing aviator glasses and swinging two sledgehammers, one in each fist.
“This is Gus, our contractor extraordinaire,” Martin said, introducing Joan and their sons. Then he nodded at Gus, and Gus laughed, and said, “Your dad wanted to give you guys a treat,” and he handed each boy a sledgehammer, and pointed to the wall that divided their rooms.
Daniel and Eric both turned to their father, and Martin said, “Go for it,” and they yelled, “Cool!” and struck the first blows at their old house, smashing holes where their heads used to rest on pillows on their beds.
Gus’s men trooped in then, and the family went back into the house. Daniel picked up his backpacks, then the four of them were down the walk, to the cars parked at the curb.
The boys looked at each other, grasped hands in a familiar way, as if walking through the red school door for so many years had taught them a code for brotherly love, no matter their differences, a secret way to say goodbye.
Daniel grabbed Eric into a rough hug, said, “Take care, buddy. Don’t be too weird at camp and try to come back as the brother I love.” Eric nodded until Daniel let him go.
“Mom,” Daniel said, pulling Joan close. He whispered into her ear, “I’ll be fine. I’ll be great. After all you’ve made me who I am. A kid who can take care of himself, who can figure shit out.” He kissed her cheek and stepped back.
He shook Martin’s hand gravely, the kind of parting Daniel thought this deserved. It would be his first time away from home for such a long period, practice before the real thing.
Eric threw himself into his father’s arms, said, “I love you, Dad,” then did the same thing to Joan.
“Honey, I’m the one taking you. Plenty of time to tell me how I’m a superlative mother, how we’re superlative parents letting you go to this camp.”
* * *
The summer was hot and dry and the grass, unchecked, grew high, covering their land in a dazzle of green light. Gus had promised that, absent any bad weather, the house would be finished by early August, an abbreviated construction schedule costing them a premium. Each night, when Martin came home from the hospital, he said, “Did you listen to the weather report, see any clouds?” and Joan would say, “I did. The weather is complying,” and, indeed, Martin’s prayers that it remain rainless were answered.
They were nomads, Joan thought, she and Martin moving ever forward in their house while the rooms in which she had raised her unexpected, unwanted family collapsed behind them. Later, they would wonder why they had not moved into Rhome’s only hotel at the far end of Strada di Felicità, lived dust-free at night.
Two weeks into the renovation, she and Martin were living in the kitchen, their bed was in there, and the television on top of the fridge, and out in the front hallway, their clothes hung on rolling racks, and in the front closet was the box securing Joan’s typewriter, pads and pens, and the thick draft of Words still hidden beneath those old coats. She would need somewhere to hide everything once the kitchen and front hallway came down, and, for a while, that box that contained her lifeblood was tucked in the trunk of her car.
She worked wherever and whenever she could in the house, if the noise was not too loud, and when it was, she edited chapters in a carrel at the Rhome library. But her presence was needed at home, on-site, in the zones of construction. She could not be absent for long, could steal only a few hours each day. She came to know Gus and his team very well, and then Tony, the swimming-pool builder, and his team.
Slowly, their new house began rising phoenixlike from the ashes. It was fascinating walking through the new cool and bare rooms, family life absent from the air. Family drained away the mystery of life, slowed, then stilled, its otherwise intrinsic thump-thump, and the cave—the cage—in which they dwelled, might change form as children grew, wriggling first fingers and toes, then gaining inches, saplings that might bear weight or give in to a hard wind. But in this new house, these new rooms, everything seemed possible once again, as pos
sible as what Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton were creating in their arcadia, in the pages of Words of New Beginnings.
Only much later when the house was furnished, when other things had happened, would Joan realize what had always been absent from those lovely and detailed architectural plans. There were the boys’ new bedrooms, large and light, and bathrooms they could roam around in; and the new master bedroom that was breathtaking with its windowed walls where she could lie in bed in the early morning and feel the weather, its enormous bathroom where she could take her nightly bath; the new den with comfortable, deep couches, and a flat-screen for watching old movies, and Martin’s cherished turntable at last having a place, the shelves of his vinyl records, the speakers in the walls; the new study with its long marble desk and new ergonomic chair, its sleek new computer not to be commandeered by Eric, and with the artifacts and relics of Martin’s profession that he had found in dusty and disquieting antique stores on all his trips operating abroad that she hoped he would not put back on display, but did; the new library with its walls filled up with all of the books she had read from childhood on—books Daniel read growing up—and Martin’s medical reference guides, textbooks, and journals, comfortable armchairs to rest in, to read in, to dream in; the new living room with its skylights that brought down the stars on their heads, with its long white womanly soft sofas, redolent of pleasure; the new dining room with its long gleaming table; and the neat square arch that led into the enormous kitchen with the massive limestone center island that was quarried in Croatia and required six burly men and a small hydraulic crane to install. The rooms were all gorgeous and inviting, but not a single room, Joan would discover, belonged only to her.
She would realize this when the gale of Eric emptied her head, turned her book into something remote, years of work hard to recall. An illogic to it all, about what was happening. It was then, too, that she considered Eric’s name, its Norse meaning—eternal ruler—that ick at the end.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 19