The Fearsome Particles

by Trevor Cole

  For Vicki, staging a house was a process of graduating insights. It wasn’t, as too many people believed, simply a matter of pushing around hunks of furniture according to some mythical decorator’s code, distributing a few tasteful knick-knacks and calling it a day. Her work was more serious than that. She was dealing in the representation of ideal lives, creating precedents for contentment. And to do that, Vicki felt, she needed to understand whose happiness she was bringing to life.

  Her first step was to suss out the character of the house she was staging, and thus the category of its likely buyer. In this case, she had already ruled out media ownership, which was a big one always to be considered, and anything to do with professional sports. No hockey players, in other words, would be buying the Lightenham Avenue house. There were two reasons for this: first, Avis Nye had few hockey players among her clientele (or, as Avis pronounced it, “clee-on-tell”); hockey players were the province of Vanrey & Donlan’s honey-haired Meredith Patrick. And second, Meredith would not be traipsing hockey players through the Lightenham Avenue house because it was not made of big blocks of stone. Hockey players might be content to let their wives rule over a home’s interior, but they would drive their throbbing Humvees and Ram trucks past any house that from the outside failed to look sufficiently hewn. It was the sweet distinction of 146 Lightenham Avenue to be constructed from carefully aged Portuguese brick of a warm, mustardy hue and it was this, Vicki felt, that pointed toward ownership more rarefied than men who wielded long sticks or large satellite dishes. It said to her money, in one of its less adulterated forms.

  She stood in the circular foyer, at the foot of the sweeping stairs, looked around at the conjoined hoops of the guilloche in the moulding above her and in the tile inlays beneath her feet, and tried to detect any hints of insurance (a predominance of greeny-greys, a slightly static flow, though the traces were generally less tangible). She walked from room to room, from dining to living to family, making her way around the chairs, tables, cabinets, and boxes that had been delivered earlier in the day. She briefly visited the library, with its wall of built-in cabinetry and its Crema Marfil fireplace surround, and wondered for a moment whether that was consultancy she was sensing. But by the time she had made it to the second level and spent a moment under the coffered ceiling of the master bedroom, she was confident that with international finance she had it accurately pinned. And she spun lightly on the balls of her stocking feet and clapped her hands together, because she was free now to do the thing she most enjoyed, and the sound of her hand clap glanced off the polished woods around her.

  She was free to create a happy, loving family.

  Her gaze fell first on the Empire dressing table with its shaped kneehole drawer and conforming columns holding erect a large square mirror which was original and nearly unblemished. She’d bought this dressing table ten or eleven years ago in Quebec City, had used it half a dozen times a year in various installations, but now stood before it as if it were new to her. She drew her fingertips across its cool, glassy surface and let her eyes focus on the fine chocolate grains in the wood until a name … Margeaux … came to her. This was Margeaux’s dressing table. She lingered in this thought for a while, in this idea of Margeaux, like a visitor in an anteroom, until she came to know some things. Margeaux, she decided, was forty-one years old. She was the owner of a small publishing company that specialized in fine art catalogues. She had dark, almost black hair that she wore in an abrupt 1920s bob that she had seen once in an early Robert Redford movie and found amusing. Vicki liked this about Margeaux, that even as an established woman, with a husband in international finance, she made impulsive choices about her personal appearance. And what else? She was well-educated in art history and philosophy. She was romantic but not to the point of losing her pragmatism. For instance, she had an affection for nature and a fierce determination to protect the environment around her – the ravines, the Carolinian forest along the escarpment – but considered efforts to preserve threatened habitats in third-world countries, however well-intentioned, sadly doomed. She enjoyed music, had years ago taken cello lessons, considered the operas of Rossini her particular favourites. L’Italiana in Algeri. She had a lovely sense of humour.

  As she stood next to the Empire dressing table, Vicki gathered and assembled the fragments of her understanding of Margeaux until she had a complete enough picture in her mind to know, without guesswork, that Margeaux would want the dressing table placed on the east wall of the master bedroom. It would be the east wall, because the morning sun coming through the windows would fall across the western half of the room, and that was where Margeaux would want the bed. Margeaux was a woman who rose early, Vicki realized, and enjoyed waking up to the feeling of sunlight on her face. And for this reason Vicki knew that the Victorian mahogany four-poster bed that lay in unassembled pieces in the middle of the room would have to go back to the warehouse. The heavy canopy would make Margeaux feel too sheltered and so it would, instead, have to be the French rosewood bedstead.

  She took up her clipboard and made a note.

  The husband. Was named … nothing fancy. Was someone who fit snugly into the world of international finance and drew notice for only the right reasons – his extreme competence, his integrity, his dignified bearing. He was a … Robert. Yes, he was indeed a Robert, and Vicki smiled to herself. She had never known a Robert before and she liked him instantly. He was a man of forty-six. Good natured – he laughed a great deal, which caused small lines to fan out like spokes from the corners of his eyes. And she saw that he ran before breakfast, every morning, because he was very trim and had slightly recessed cheeks that accentuated his strong cheekbones and narrow jaw. His blond hair was faintly thinning at the top, and it didn’t concern him because it wasn’t a matter of health. It was good health that motivated Robert to get up at five-thirty every weekday, seven-thirty on weekends, and run an eight-kilometre loop through the tree-lined neighbourhood, even in winter. His father had probably died of a heart condition at a relatively early age, and Robert was determined not to let it happen to him. He was a man of decisive action.

  His work? The specifics weren’t important, but Vicki knew that Robert handled complex cross-border transactions in the hundreds of millions of dollars, that he enjoyed the interplay of different cultures, and that he was looking forward to making great strides in China. He was shrewd when it came to risk and he was deft with debt. He established clear plans of action and trusted his team to execute them. That was a good word for Robert – trust. He hired the right people, and he delegated. And he did not let the small mistakes of others shake his confidence in them. Robert – here was a good example – would not be the sort to dwell on the inability of his wife to deliver the Heimlich manoeuvre if he was choking on an olive. First of all, Robert wouldn’t put himself in the position of needing the Heimlich, because he would never walk through the house naked, his hands occupied with wine glasses and his mouth filled with kalamatas, presenting an open invitation to catastrophe. And if it so happened that he did find himself needing the Heimlich, he wouldn’t expect his wife to have prepared for the occasion by taking lessons in the procedure. And he wouldn’t hold it against her for reacting to the broken glass and red wine all over the Hamadan runner and not instantly noticing his hands around his neck and his face going purple. Robert let things go. He had balance in his life, and at six o’clock almost every evening he was on his way home, free from worry. Sometimes he called Margeaux from his car, just to hear her voice. And he left her blessed clocks alone.

  When Vicki knew all this about Robert, and a few other things besides, she was able to relax about the Carlton House desk with satinwood inlay that was at this moment sitting in the library downstairs. She’d selected it on a whim and it had been a worry because it was not a very big desk, and with its narrow legs rather than pedestals, not terribly masculine. But Robert was too secure in his own skin for it to matter to him whether or not his desk was conventionally ma
nnish. Robert was, in a phrase, at ease.

  Vicki went to her purse and pulled out her phone. “Hella,” she said when her assistant picked up, “would you be a dear and find the two Chinese folding chairs and put them out for me? I’m going to need one or perhaps both of them.”

  “You mean the curly-back chairs with the sort of footstep things at the bottom?”

  Hella was so cute. “Yes,” said Vicki, almost chuckling, “the curly-back chairs. We’re going to need them for the library.”

  Hella hesitated. “I think one of them has a split in the seat.”

  “Oh?” Vicki pictured the pair of two-hundred-year-old Chinese folding chairs in her mind and tried to see the split Hella was referring to. The seat of a Chinese folding chair was little more than a wide leather sling and a split would render it unusable. One had to expect that on occasion a buyer would see one of her chairs or couches and find it irresistible and want to touch it or sit in it – the Chinese folding chairs were particularly intriguing – and one couldn’t have prospective buyers crashing through the furniture. But a split in the seat was the sort of thing she’d remember. “No, I don’t think so, Hella.”

  “Um, I’m pretty sure there is.”

  Vicki was still scanning the picture in her mind. “No. No. I think we’re fine. Anyway just put them out for me. And also we’re going to need the French rosewood bedstead so I’ll have you get that ready as well if you would, and there may be one or two other things so – are you at home now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, be sure to keep your phone on.” Hella had a habit of turning her phone off at inopportune times, which made it impossible for Vicki to get hold of her. “I’ll see you at the warehouse about three.”

  “Sure, but, would four-thirty be okay?”

  Vicki, making her way from one bedroom to another, smiled into the shiny emptiness of the corridor. “Of course,” she said, and returned the phone to her purse.

  And back to the Lightenham family. Having introduced herself to the wife and husband, it was time for Vicki to meet the child. There was always a child to be considered in a staging and frequently two, depending on the bedroom configuration. In the case of the Lightenham house there was one child – the third and fourth bedrooms, lacking walk-in closets (unconscionable builder’s mistake), were strictly for guests in Vicki’s view and could be furnished generically with two nineteenth-century walnut suites that suited the purpose (one of these rooms would get the Ralph Lauren horsey treatment; the other, botanicals); the fifth bedroom, barely seventeen feet in length, was ideal for live-in staff and Vicki had already installed a lovely Victorian brass bedstead there with a very serviceable mahogany linen press and a nice caned-back bergère tucked in one corner. But the child demanded special attention. As children did.

  It was a boy, obviously. As much as Vicki would have liked a girl, because her collection of fine girls’ linens was more extensive, the room was a boy’s and there was no avoiding it. It was a large room of awkward angles with a sloping ceiling that rose to an off-centre peak. And in the middle of the wall below this peak, at one end of the room, was an oeil-de-boeuf, which some people called a bull’s-eye window, that looked out over the backyard and its nearly treeless landscaped plateaus (the treelessness made Vicki a little sad because she was fairly sure Robert would have enjoyed drinking his morning coffee in the summer on a patio shaded by a spreading burr oak. Perhaps Margeaux had insisted on unfettered sunlight and he had indulged her. Yes. He was generous that way). It was this window more than anything that said “boy” to Vicki. It was a concession, really, on her part. Boys were rabid about a bull’s eye; depending on their age it became the portal of a submarine or a spacecraft, or a time-travel conduit, or some other threshold into fantastic scenarios that invariably involved explosions and death. From the slightest provocation the minds of boys could conjure up horrifying things; they seemed to lust after opportunities to imagine the worst. And as they grew older their fantasies evolved into grotesque adolescent hallucinations – the spaceship portal that looked out became an eye peeking in, the room became a display cabinet and the boys were the gruesome exhibit, something carved open, pinned, and observed – which made them ecstatic in some unfathomable way, until it happened that, sooner or later, the boys became men, the fantasias dissolved and an oeil-de-boeuf returned to being merely a strange round window, an element in an architect’s design. This, at least, was Vicki’s understanding, from growing up with brothers and cousins who were disturbingly normal, and from Kyle.

  The afternoon sun warmed the southern face of 146 Lightenham Avenue, and the house creaked with the musical yearning of new wood. In the boy’s bedroom, Vicki padded around in an aimless circle, letting her stocking heels thud against the new iroko flooring, and waited. Inspiration had usually rushed up to her by now. In all the years of doing stagings – beginning that first summer in 1989 with the pile on Inglewood Drive that, even including the pieces from her mother’s estate, she’d barely had enough furniture to fill – she’d always managed to skirt the disquieting aspects of exuberant young boys and find expressions for their happier enthusiasms, which she could incorporate into the general scheme. What she did was think of Kyle (in 1989 he was already three) and equip these rooms for the childhood she wished for him: pennants and paraphernalia artfully mounted (a Cooper’s hockey stick and a Louisville baseball bat, crossed like swords) to suggest his nascent love of sports; a brass refracting telescope at a window, pointed to the sky, to connote his searching mind. Even, occasionally (because pretending was something to be encouraged), a cowboy hat and a pair of cap-gun six-shooters in their holsters, draped over a bedpost (though she had not used the guns for years).

  As Kyle grew older, the boys of Vicki’s stagings grew with him, always keeping a few years ahead, to suggest the great times that were surely to come, when he would dive into mystery books with pristine jackets, when he would play a Martin acoustic guitar with an ebony fingerboard, when he would reel with his first crush, go on his first date, and kiss a girl with long, straight hair (estate sales often had a few pictures worth framing, and Vicki found the straight-haired girls prettiest). Every boy’s room in Vicki’s stagings offered the burnished life that Kyle or any boy should have wanted, a life of milk-white teeth and exercise, high spirits, and limitless possibility. It was easy to furnish this kind of happiness: she had most of it ready, in storage. And when she lacked some small thing, some final touch – a crystal radio set the boy could have fashioned himself, a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera to showcase his developing artistic eye – it was quickly found at one of the Yorkville antique shops she visited on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

  A very few times, as Kyle matured, Vicki felt her confidence waver. No one ever told her that a boy’s life was not like this. Not once did Avis or any other agent suggest, in so many words, that clients found her boy’s room stagings unrealistic. But every so often, Vicki could see a hint of doubt behind their eyes, and their muted approval seemed to insinuate that she was not taking certain grim realities into account. When that happened, when the uncertainty of others threatened to become hers, she reminded herself that her boy’s rooms were as realistic, as possible, as any other room she created. The articles she used and the pleasures they represented were absolutely real; that her arrangements were precise and ideal made them no less true. When a woman and her husband admired the dining room she had summoned, complete with pooling drapes, a festooned sideboard, and a six-branch Viennese chandelier suspended over a Belleek tea service on a Gillington table, it never occurred to them her taste was unachievable – this was exactly the life they imagined for themselves. When they looked in on the girl’s room, they never thought Vicki’s pastels and scalloped-edge sheets, her dolls and porcelain fixtures could not be things a girl, their daughter, would love. Why couldn’t this be true for a boy? Why should a son be less deserving of a parent’s best intentions?

  Her responsibility, Vicki told herself, w
as to offer clients a vision of the life they wanted for their children. For wasn’t this life, or the hope for it, one of the reasons they were house shopping at all?

  Some of these thoughts came back to Vicki now in the Lightenham house, because although there was no doubt she knew what a happy boy’s life was supposed to look like, just at the moment, the ideas weren’t coming to her. That was strange. When her mind drifted to Kyle she saw the possible cause; it was because he’d just come home from abroad, a man of travels now, no longer the handy boyish reference he’d been. She would have to work harder. She would have to cast her mind back. Still, Vicki stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by the mahogany sleigh bed with scrolling at the head- and footboards, the matching dressing table with swinging mirror, the revolving Edwardian bookcase and the charming mahogany bonheur du jour with its hinged front and padded writing surface. She saw these things, chosen by her and delivered only this morning, and felt troubled by them. The problem was she could not see the boy who belonged here, did not even know his name, and without a child to represent, these things were just furnishings. That was not the service she offered.

  As she paced around the room, touching the corners of antiques that provided no clues, a slight burning sensation made Vicki look down to where she had tucked her hand between the buttons of her blouse. She undid two of these buttons and found she had been rubbing the spot under her ribs so hard the skin was beginning to turn raw.