Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re barely sleeping. You skip dinner too often. You’re so tight on time you’re not even ironing your shirts before you go to work.”

  “So what?”

  “I haven’t seen you play guitar for weeks. Your meditation’s gone out the window, too.”

  “I’ve handled this before.”

  “Yeah, but finishing projects has always been for your job. Now it’s your second job. Or third, since you’re now a carpenter, too. You can’t expect to be alert with every detail.”

  “Obviously I’m not.”

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “Find the coat.” He laughs ruefully.

  “I guess it helps to be able to laugh at yourself.”

  “I learned that early in this line of work.”

  “Well, what if I help you with the third floor? You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  “There’s nothing you can help with.”

  “I can paint.”

  “When’s the last time you painted?”

  “I was fifteen, helping my mother out. She paid me.”

  “I remember the story. I also remember you were terrible.”

  “You need help. And I’ll try to be a good painter. Or at least a not-terrible one.”

  “All right.” He sounds relieved. “Can you start tonight?”

  That night I find myself, Ms. Non-Third Dimension, reaching for Hal’s clothes again. Since I own nothing that I’d sacrifice to paint, I put on a pair of navy corduroys too small for him but sliding off me, and the T-shirt in which he laid the stone wall. Because there’s no heat on the third floor—the specs call for a separate wall unit, but it remains inoperative because Sparky and Torch, who knew how to get it working, were released from the job—I also wear a sweatshirt, hood up. Because I don’t want to ruin my skin, I pull on yellow Playtex gloves that I grabbed at the last minute. A professional painter would laugh at this parody of an amateur. I look at myself in the mirrored medicine cabinet—now on the floor of the third story, waiting for Hal’s saw—and see a Fashion Frankenstein.

  “Start with the railing,” Hal says, as he changes into work clothes. “There’s the primer.”

  I look at the railing, which separates one end of the room from the staircase. “Which part? The newel post? Spindles? The top rail?”

  “Just prime the whole thing.”

  Priming the railing turns out to be impossible for me to bungle. It’s also satisfying—at some point in our house’s history, an ancestral homeowner painted this railing the orange of Gulf gas stations, and needless to say, I’ve been eager to see it go. Hal, in the meantime, rolls primer on the walls. Unlike the rest of the house, they’re gray paneling, and have always given the third floor the ambiance of a sixties rec room. His work last week consisted of disguising the paneling with generous applications of joint compound, and with the primer rolling on from ceiling to floor, the paneling might as well have metamorphosed into drywall.

  As we labor away, concealing the decorating preferences of people long gone from this house and perhaps this earth, we listen to cassette tapes Hal brought—Neil Finn, Crowded House, Sandy Denny. We chat about our day, and the songs. I finish the railing and start on the baseboards. Hal moves to the next wall. We are painting our house. We are entering the pantheon of the fearlessly handy. We are engaged in the long tradition of the industrious American do-it-yourselfer. I bet there aren’t many writing professors who are sitting on a frigid floor right now, dipping a brush into primer and sweeping it across baseboards. Actually, I bet there are. Two thousand Home Depots and fifteen hundred Lowe’s don’t exist for nothing. I am finally in the know—or as in the know as I can be, given how little I know.

  We have a grand time. We catch each other up on his projects at work, my new bevy of students, and the colors he’s considering for the railing and accent wall in this room. When we get hungry, he calls in an order for takeout from the Japanese restaurant a few blocks away, then walks to pick it up. I eat while he primes, he eats while I prime. Occasionally I go to warm myself on the lower floors, which the furnace makes cozy, and where I can gaze out the windows, now finally replaced. The rest of the time I prime, musing about our pioneer spirit.

  Our architect-assistant team finishes in the Olympic record of four hours, feeling so resourceful and efficient, I’m sure he’s forgotten about his recent mistakes. I decide that I have.

  But as we’re about to leave for the rented house, he pauses on the second floor to shine a work light into the bathroom, saying, “They’ve finished tiling the walls.” I expect to see what we bought during the Cretaceous era of demolition—white tiles punctuated by blue-and-green glass. Partially, this is what I see. The white tiles are laid perfectly. But the colored glass on the main wall is sparse where it will be most visible, and dense where it will be hidden by the toilet.

  “I can’t believe they did that,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he agrees.

  “I guess we can’t ask them to change it, can we?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, it seems pretty stupid. How could they set those beautiful glass pieces so a lot of them won’t even be seen?”

  “I don’t know.” He turns off the light. “But I’m no one to throw stones.”

  Driving to the rented house, wet paint on the corduroys staining the lining of my winter coat, Hal in his car behind mine, unsuccessfully warding off the cold with a spring jacket, I feel ashamed of my insensitive comments, and vow not to give in any more to complaint.

  Two nights later we return for the first coat of paint. I am wearing Hal’s same clothes, which now look worse, smeared as they’ve been with primer. I am also discomfited to see Dan, but then remember that the job meeting was switched from tomorrow to tonight, and realize that he doesn’t care how I look. In his line of work, he sees fashion obliviousness every day.

  As we go through the rooms, marking off Hal’s new list, I marvel at the changes in just the last two days. It is February 1. We have sixteen days left, so things are moving fast. The crystal doorknobs we selected months ago have appeared. Blue linoleum has been laid in the bathroom, and the toilet will arrive soon. Most impressively, the wooden floors have been sanded throughout the house. They look smooth and golden as a desert landscape, one that will gleam after sealant is applied tomorrow.

  “Don’t forget that the floor guy comes back tonight, too,” Dan says, “to prepare the kitchen for the linoleum.”

  After the meeting, we hurry upstairs. With time running so short—and all the more so because the floor sealant will take a few days to dry, prohibiting us from entering the house—Hal made his color selections for the third floor on his own today, stopping at a store after work.

  As I retrieve the brushes from a closet and he changes out of his office clothes into the work apparel I brought for him—clothes remarkably unslopped by the very same primer that frosts my ensemble—he tells me his color scheme. “All the walls on the third floor will be white except the accent wall. That will be pale lavender—‘Breathtaking.’ ”

  “Good choice.” We used Breathtaking in the second floor hallway, and I adore it.

  “The same color will also cover the top railing and newel post.”

  “Great. The spindles, too?”

  “No, I picked a different color for them.”

  Aviary Blue? I wonder. Samovar Silver? “What did you pick?”

  “Green.”

  “Green?” I look at the can. It’s not just green, but a hideous brownish evergreen. I do not look at the name, but I imagine it’s called Mildew Toad. “Dark green with lavender?”

  He pulls his painter’s shirt over his head. “Yup.”

  “I don’t think that’ll look too good.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

  I say nothing. I’m here to help out. Anyway, the architect knows best, right?

  I begin with the top railing, painting Breathtaking,
which is as elegant as a Degas tutu. “You could do the whole railing in this color,” I say.

  “It’s been decided,” Hal says, rolling Breathtaking along the accent wall.

  This time, we’re listening to news on the radio. Perhaps this is a mistake. The radio thwarts our efforts at conversation, and the stories are all troubling: the president has just announced that Americans are addicted to oil, although critics say that his efforts fall short of the necessary changes. We’ve just completed the warmest January on record, though there’s no consensus in our country about the cause, let alone cure. There’s also a contingent pushing for ethanol, although some scientists say that its production will eat more energy than it makes.

  At the end of the news segments, Hal expresses apprehension about the future of the planet, and I indicate dismay at the inability of humanity to come to universal accord about our environment—or anything. “Is it really that hard for people to listen to each other?” I ask. Hal says, “Most people don’t want to admit they might be wrong.”

  While we paint, we hear the floor subcontractor, Kevin, arrive downstairs. He’ll be applying a patching substance to the concrete that currently constitutes the kitchen floor, making the surface level in preparation for the linoleum. “With him working,” Hal points out, “it might be hard to get to the basement door.” This is important, because the basement still contains a rudimentary bathroom, with a working, if unappealing, toilet and sink—which we never used, but which have surely helped Dan’s guys, and are essential for our comfort tonight, as well as for rinsing brushes. “Once Kevin gets that stuff down, we might have to go out the front and in the back so we can reach the basement door in the kitchen without stepping on his work.”

  This circuitous route to the bathroom will certainly be unpleasant with the temperature in the twenties, but the workers have dealt with far worse conditions for months. I can rough it for a night or two. I’m tough. I’m an architect’s assistant. I can do what needs to be done.

  “Okay,” Hal says when I finish the Breathtaking part of my job. “Wash off the brush in the basement and then you can start on the green.”

  Green, I think, but I just head downstairs. In the dining room- kitchen, I meet Kevin, who is in his forties, with a wrestler’s physique and a receding hairline. He’s on knee pads, troweling on his mud-colored substance. I say I need to reach the basement—should I just go outside to the back door? No, he says, rising, and then casts about for a way to get me across his patch. “You got a ladder?” he asks. A six-step ladder is folded against the wall. He brings it over, then finds two scraps of wood, which he lays parallel to each other on either side of the mud-colored patch. Then he sets the still-folded ladder horizontally on top of the scraps so the ladder becomes a bridge. “How clever,” I say as he helps me walk, each step of the ladder a plank over a gorge. “I’m always figuring out ways to get folks from one side of a room to another,” he says.

  The basement, on which we saved money by making no improvements at all, is bone-rattlingly cold, as is the water from this tap. I wash the brushes as hastily as possible.

  When I return to the third floor, I see that Hal has opened the can of green paint for me. His back is to me as he rolls the first coat of white onto the nonaccent walls.

  I look down into Mildew Toad. It reminds me of the dental glue that my orthodontist used for a cast of my teeth when I was ten, and which made me gag. It reminds me of the patch Kevin is troweling onto the kitchen floor now. “This color doesn’t seem right,” I say.

  “Just paint.”

  I can’t believe that he won’t even angle his head to see my turned-up lip. I can’t believe that with all my help, he won’t listen. I’ve always heard that architects can be imperious, but Hal’s gentle ways seemed to refute that stereotype. Have I been wrong all this time?

  He knows best, I tell myself.

  Maybe he doesn’t, I argue in my head.

  This is what he does for a living.

  But he’s not perfect. Look at those recent misjudgments.

  Anyway, it’s his studio.

  It’s our house.

  Stop being controlling.

  Prove it will look bad by starting.

  I dip my brush in the can. Feeling like I’m on the brink of overturning a barrel of dioxin, I bring the bristles to the newel post. Eggghhh. It’s even worse than I expected.

  I say, “Do you want to see how this looks?”

  Hal’s back is still to me. “No.”

  I grit my teeth and press on. I give it another ten, twenty strokes.

  “I have to tell you,” I blurt out. “This makes me nauseous.”

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!” Hal says, whirling around.

  “How can you talk to me that way?”

  “You’re just going on and on!”

  “That’s rude. Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “It’s not rude. You asked me if I wanted you to stop and I said no and that’s it! Done.”

  “But this color’s awful!”

  “You made that perfectly clear.”

  “So why are you using it?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Go wash the brush. Just stop.”

  “You’re not going through with the green?”

  “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’re not.”

  “When did you decide that?”

  “A while ago.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Look, we’re wasting time. Just wash the brush, and start doing the baseboards.”

  Oh, no, I think, returning downstairs only minutes after I traversed Kevin’s ladder bridge, it’s happening to us. All the stories I’ve heard about couples during renovation: the bickering, the criticizing, the snapping, the whining, the not listening. I’ve even begun to see articles about it. Renovation dissension. Even though we haven’t lived on the job site, we liked our contractor, our contractor made good after our disaster, our budget has swelled by only a few thousand, one of us is a professional, one of us has been invisible. Still, we have not escaped.

  Avoiding eye contact with Kevin, I hurry to the basement, my cheeks tight. The water in the sink is so cold, even through the gloves it hurts my hands. I wash the brush, my nose and eyes running, my wet gloves finding a used tissue in my sweatshirt. I feel like a rainy drop cloth. I want to go back to the rented house. I want to get on a plane. I want to run away to the moon.

  Back upstairs, I’m too upset to speak. Hal smiles as if nothing’s wrong, his way, I know, of drawing me back to a place of unity. He tells me I should do a second coat of Breathtaking while he turns his attention toward the white. Then we paint in silence.

  A half hour passes, then an hour. I don’t know what he’s thinking, and it’s all I can do to fight the impulse to bolt from the third floor and go cry in my car. But I keep reminding myself: I do not just love my husband, and I am not just committed to him. I also need to act on my commitment. These are not the same thing, which I came to appreciate only after Hal and I got married. I would like to think that I could have absorbed such basic concepts by, say, voting age, and perhaps that’s the case for some people. Not until I was living with Hal in my twenties, however, did I realize that I had little understanding of the connection between love and commitment. This happened when I watched friends defect from the single life into marriage and I beseeched them to explain how they’d become decisive. They said they’d finally felt ready to commit. But what did that mean? Had they found such true love that the desire to flee was eradicated? I didn’t think so. They seemed to love their betrothed, but not swooningly so. Then Hal and I broke up, and my idea of true love was revealed as delusion. Oh, I thought, as I spoke with Robin, and Harriet, and struggled to learn the lessons of love, I guess that when people love their partner—not as a soul mate, but as a down-to-earth romantic friend and lifelong ally—they just dec
ide to stay. That must be what commitment is. This is the thought I carried with me when Hal and I strolled in our wedding finery through the streets of Wilmington to the justice of the peace. But even as our two witnesses threw rose petals when we left the county building that day, I still did not understand that deciding to commit was different from acting on commitment.

  My epiphany came two days later, on a seasonable May afternoon when Hal and I were walking in the Brandywine Creek Park. During a conversation whose content has long faded from memory, Hal used a tone of voice that I interpreted as patronizing. Hurt, I reacted as I had when I’d taken exception to similar slights in our first thirteen years: I ceased being able to speak, and could think only of running away. We continued walking, him unaware of my jaw tensing because we were both facing forward, me thinking, Leave! Get out of here now!

  But this time I fell into an inner dialogue, and talked back to myself in my head.

  Wait a minute, I thought. I can’t leave. I just got married.

  Sure you can, my steaming thoughts responded. The wedding was just two days ago. You haven’t been married long enough for it to really count. And look at how he just talked to you!

  He probably doesn’t even know what he sounded like.

  If you just seclude yourself in your study when you get home from this walk, you won’t have to talk to him anymore.

  What kind of resolution is that?

  The one you used to do.

  But if I go off by myself, he’ll get confused and I’ll get angrier and the relationship will feel even worse than it feels right now. What if I just, well, talk to him?

  Don’t be ridiculous. You’re so hurt, you’ll cry if you open your mouth.

  Maybe I should just force myself.

  What would you say?

  I’ll say, “Hal, the way you just said that comment you made? It hurt me.”