by Lisa Tognola
He breathed loudly through his nose. “Janie, he’s my boss. It’s not like I can just tell him I have to leave because my wife has a rib-eye resting at home.”
His sarcasm only fueled my anger. “You have no idea how hard it is overseeing construction all day and taking care of the kids. Today I didn’t even shower.”
“Do you think I want to be here? Do you think I want to work until eight, nine o’clock every night? Believe me, I’d much rather be home relaxing on the sofa and spending time with my wife and kids.”
I partly believed him. But the way we argued, sometimes I wondered. Sitting in our tiny breakfast nook under our decorative apple plates and looking at the kitchen counter—dirty dishes scattered everywhere—I felt helpless. Exhausted too. I told him so.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want your help!”
“I am helping. I’m working hard for us, for our family.” He exhaled loudly in one big breath. “I have to go,” he said, suddenly, and a second later I heard a dial tone.
Furious, I dialed back, my fingers flying across the buttons on the phone.
“Don’t ever hang up on me!” I exploded when he answered.
“I didn’t hang up on you.”
“Yes you did. That’s the rudest thing anyone can ever do!” I screamed. I kept eying the stairway to make sure the kids weren’t listening.
“Calm down,” he said, words that in any situation are guaranteed to make a person more furious. “Janie, I am at work. I am not going to have this conversation right now. We can discuss it when I get home.”
“Fine, bye!” I hung up the phone, threw myself down on the sofa, and sobbed into a cushion. I sat up, grabbed a pair of Wim’s underwear from the laundry basket, wadded it up into a ball, and hurled it across the room. “Do your own fucking laundry!” I shouted at the white cotton boxer briefs that I had bought him on sale at Macy’s the week before. They floated through the air and grazed the ceiling fan before landing a woefully short distance away, making me feel even more helpless than I already did.
Staring at the ceiling, I watched the fan blades rotate until they slowed to a stop. The fan reminded me of our marriage: two independent sets of blades operating as one unit, blades that sometimes fell out of balance and caused the fan to wobble. The fan, I knew, could usually be fixed with a little extra care. I also knew that in some cases, if you let the fan wobble for too long, you’ll have to rebuild it altogether.
CHAPTER 23: MY LITTLE BLACK BOOK
Raymond Ave, Rye – October 2007
Over the following months, Luke and I spent a lot of time together. During school hours, whenever I wasn’t driving through neighborhoods photographing inspiring homes and poring over home magazines, I was with our architect.
Other than Wim, this was the most time I’d spent with any man since college, and it felt strange. I’d been a stay-at-home mom for twelve years. The only time I was around men anymore was at the occasional cocktail party, and even then I mostly chatted with women. On the rare occasion when I came into contact with a middle-aged man, he was either delivering my FedEx package, shmearing my bagel with cream cheese, or striding past my house from the train station, carrying the burden of his mortgage in his briefcase. Since marrying Wim, the closest encounter I’d had with another man was with my dentist, and even he saw me as just a mouth; I’d only been intimate with his appliances.
Sitting at my dining room table one morning, just the two of us, surrounded by rolls of blueprints, Luke and I discussed design details. I had in my possession the Black Book. Not the proverbial little black book from my single life; gone were the days that I needed a relationship tool to catalogue the phone numbers, addresses, and secrets of lovers and ex-lovers. I had entered a new passage in my life in which data had replaced dating, tray ceilings had replaced ashtrays, and semi-gloss had replaced lip gloss.
My Black Book, the one that had grown so large I’d had to create a separate kitchen binder, was a three-inch round-ring vinyl binder, organized room by room, that contained inspirational cutouts of magazine photos and Polaroids of design elements I wanted to incorporate in our home. It was thicker than a dictionary and longer than Moby Dick, and it already had so much wear I’d had to repair the page holes with hole-punch reinforcements and bind the broken spine with special tape the way my grandma used to do at my school library. I leaned on it like a friend. I carried it like a baby. And I referred to it as if it were the Holy Bible.
Still, regardless of what kind of book it was, I’d never spent this many hours with a man and not had sex. I was suddenly aware of how we were relating, conscious of what felt to me like a good vibe. Building this house had stirred something inside of me, maybe something a little bit dangerous.
“What do you want the front door to look like?” Luke asked.
“This,” I said, flipping through the ‘Facade’ section of my binder until I reached the Renovation Style photo of a shingle-style home with a beautiful mahogany door surrounded by art deco leaded glass. “I like using pictures,” I explained.
Luke glanced at the binder and nodded. “It’s helpful.”
I smiled, pleased to have my efforts recognized.
“The door will be custom made, and I have glass samples I can show you,” he said. “How about your family room fireplace mantle? Any ideas?”
I turned to the fireplace section and pointed to a classic limestone mantle featured in Architectural Digest. “What do you think?”
“That will look great,” he said.
Though I’d become more familiar with Luke, in some ways I’d become less at ease, with increased awareness of how close I was sitting to him, whether I had lipstick on my teeth, and whether I needed to pop another Tic Tac.
“Any other special features you’d like in the family room?”
I turned back a few pages and showed him several photos of built-in window seats. “Can you custom design it to look like these, but make it an oversize daybed that fits a twin bed?”
“A bed?”
“Our friends in Texas have one. They made it deep enough to fit a mattress and custom upholstered it. It’s a great cozying-up space. It has built-in storage underneath for games and photo albums.” I envisioned myself snuggling with my kids in the window seat and playing Crazy Eights on a snowy day.
Luke had an amused twinkle in his eye. “Yes, we can do that.”
Once we were done with the family room, he explained that our kitchen designer would take care of details like cabinet dividers for cookie sheets and locating appliances. He handed me a list of cabinetmakers he’d worked with, and as I reached forward, my hand accidentally brushed against his. I felt a quiver but pretended not to notice. Nothing registered on his face.
“Moving on to the second floor. Let’s talk about your and Wim’s bedroom,” he said.
My face and ears grew hot. Suddenly, it wasn’t the kids I was picturing myself snuggling with.
CHAPTER 24: DOUBLE FUDGE SUNDAE
Raymond Ave, Rye – October 2007
Home theaters are over-the-top,” I said one night, trying to steer Wim away from something I considered an unnecessary extravagance. Aside from the cost, I hated the idea of everyone sitting in his or her own chair watching movies together but separately. Wasn’t family movie time supposed to be spent watching and cuddling?
Wim and I worked toward a shared vision for our dream house until it came to the basement. He wanted a home theater, with leather cinema-style seating and a sixty-inch TV, where he could watch Die Hard and hear the explosions in surround sound. I argued that the seats would interfere with the game tables I would be using to entertain my girlfriends during Friday-night bunko, a dice game we used as an excuse for social drinking and jokingly referred to as “drunko.”
“Our entire project is over-the-top,” Wim said. “We’re not building a cabin in the woods. Did you see the latest construction invoice?”
No, in fact, I hadn’t seen the
invoice; paying the bills was Wim’s job. Over the years, we’d taken turns paying bills, until one day I’d accidentally withdrawn instead of deposited money from our checking account and caused dozens of checks to bounce. Now it was my job to open the mail. And whenever I opened an invoice from the construction company, I shielded my eyes from the numbers. I knew how much things cost; I just didn’t want to know what they added up to. I wasn’t proud of my ostrich-like behavior, but I couldn’t help myself.
I figured Wim would let me know if we’d spent too much, the same way he sometimes did when our Visa bill came due. “We have to cut back,” he’d say. Reminding him of last year’s bonus never helped. The notion of a bonus was a tricky one in his business. In its crudest form, it was a little like being a waiter. There was a base salary, but it wasn’t at all commensurate with what his job entailed. The bonus was like pulling tips; it was the money we largely lived off of.
Our standard of living had always been defined by Wim’s bonuses—and for years, those bonuses had been ample. But they were never guaranteed. No matter how big his bonus was in any given year, he always had to worry about the next one.
In deference to his concerns, at the beginning of each fiscal year, we always made a conscious effort to eat out less often and turn off the lights when we left the room. Then, a few weeks later, we’d return to our normal habits.
The truth is, I was happy to allow Wim to be the one in charge. I was essentially like a child. I didn’t pay bills, I didn’t know how much things amounted to, and I blithely assumed everything would be okay.
We didn’t realize while building the house how temptation can trick you into confusing need with desire. It’s like being firmly committed to your diet, then being tempted by a double fudge sundae. How easy it is to say, “We’ll just splurge on a Sub-Zero refrigerator for the kitchen. After all, we’re only doing this once.” But it all adds up, and pretty soon you’ve left Jenny Craig for Ben & Jerry. And then, of course, you spring for the Sub-Zero freezer.
Sitting on the sofa beside me, Wim had a coffee table book propped on his lap to support the drawing he had sketched of two game rooms in the basement adjoined by oversize double sliding doors. “We can put a pool table in this room and a Ping-Pong table and a few arcade games in the other.” He looked hungrily at the entertainment space that we imagined filling with friends and family, young and old. I wondered if it reminded him of being a teenager in Upstate New York, spending long winters hanging out in a basement filled with beanbag chairs, a Ping-Pong table, and his sister’s balance beam. I didn’t share those kinds of subterranean memories. Like many native Californians, I was raised in a house built on a concrete slab and only knew how to relax above ground. But this wasn’t my playhouse with my rules. We were doing this together.
In our old house, we’d wanted a Ping-Pong table but hadn’t been able to find a spot for it. At one point we’d considered putting one in the dining room, but even that room had been too small. Our new home would have a basement that spanned the entire length of the house—enough space for three Ping-Pong tables and a pool table to boot.
But now, even two thousand square feet weren’t enough to satisfy Wim. It wasn’t enough that we could fit an entire Peruvian village in our rec room, or that we would soon have a guest suite with enough amenities—including a king-size bed and wall TV—to run a bed and breakfast, complete with white fluffy towels and a soaking tub. It wasn’t enough that we had a playroom and a billiards room.
“I like the idea of multiple game rooms,” I said. I gave his arm a squeeze, and he looked up and smiled. I loved seeing him excited about our house and planning how to maximize the fun we’d have in it. It made me feel like my own ongoing spending frenzy was okay.
A few months earlier, Wim had decided he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to add additional square footage. He said it was for resale value. We’d gone through the same debate over yard size when we were house hunting. I’d have settled for enough space for a barbecue, whereas Wim wanted a backyard park. “I want land,” he said. I reminded him that we weren’t raising cattle.
If he couldn’t possess the whole North American continent, he’d decided, he could at least dig under the garage and create an all-purpose room in the basement.
“We’ll have so much space down there; why do we need to dig more?” I’d asked.
“Because we can. Space is at a premium in this town. It will create value.”
It all made sense. Wim always made sense.
“What about safety?” I asked. “I don’t want my minivan crashing through the ceiling.”
“We’ll install steel beams for support, like they do in a parking garage.”
“This isn’t Port Authority,” I said.
He shut his eyes for a moment, as if gathering patience. “You’ve made decisions on the kitchen, family room, master bathroom … can I at least have a say on a room under our house?”
I nodded, reminding myself that I’d recently decided, against Wim’s better judgment, to hire our expensive kitchen designer, Joan, to also design our master bathroom, and that I should take his needs into consideration. Besides, he was the one with good business sense. A great deal of energy and money was flowing out the door with this project, but I trusted that he wouldn’t allow all of it to run out.
CHAPTER 25: SCONES AND SCONCES
Raymond Ave, Rye – October 2007
As the process continued, we were forced to make more decisions that seemed impossibly premature. It felt to me as if the foundation had barely been poured when Glenn—our operations manager, the guy whose job it was to coordinate the building aspect of the project—began bombarding me with emails: What type of hardware are you using? How tall do you want your bathroom vanity? Where do you want your shower niche? As he explained that things like tile required a long lead time, he warned, “You need to stay on top of the construction schedule I gave you. You’re going to have an entire house’s worth of decisions to make before it’s all over.”
If it had been difficult for me to visualize the house plans, it was even harder for me to imagine how everything would eventually all come together. Like making a paper snowflake, you snip here and you snip there, but you don’t know what it’s really going to look like until you open it up for the reveal, and it would be a long while until we opened our snowflake.
The project cycled in waves of intensity, which for me brought on waves of obsession. We were finally enjoying a lull in decision-making while the roof was going up, and then—bam! Floors were upon us. I started researching flooring on the Internet and learning everything there was on the subject—tile, concrete, wood, stone—just to satisfy myself that what we were selecting was the best choice for us. I was plagued by my own compulsive need to know that I had researched every possible option; only then, I felt, could I make the “right” decision. Usually, “right” meant I found a product identical to the magazine picture I’d pasted into my Black Book—or, in the rare case that I didn’t have a picture, a product that matched the vision I had in my head.
I wanted perfection. I wanted every floor, window, and hinge to look perfect, operate perfectly, and coordinate perfectly. My self-worth depended on it. For years I had listened to my dad tell me how my mom had worked tirelessly with their architect to design a perfect house. I’d grown up feeling like I needed to live up to those expectations. My parents had raised me to have high standards, and it had imbued me with a strong need to control every aspect of my life, especially how others perceived me. This was my opportunity to achieve a level of perfectionism that would make me feel worthy and accepted.
Time forced us to divvy up much of the decision-making responsibility. Wim and I divided tasks by giving each other “honeydew” lists, the catchy little phrase meaning, “Honey, do this,” and “Honey, do that”—or, more accurately, “Please do all the tedious crap I don’t want to do.” I was anointed Queen of Color, charged with overseeing everything related to hue and desig
n. Even things as mundane as door hinges. Wim was relegated to anything I found even more boring than hinges, like fireplaces, insulation, and stereo systems.
Wim and I habitually debriefed one another on each day’s progress by phone or email. What did the plumber say about the mudroom faucet? Do we have an estimate for the exterior stone? What type of windows should we order? I liked working as a team—solving construction problems together, bonding over plumbing and electrical.
We spent one evening huddled in front of our computer in our home office, researching energy-efficient windows. Sitting there beside my husband, I recalled our early years together, when we’d been forced to make tough decisions about whether and how to continue our long-distance relationship. Now we were making decisions on double- versus triple-pane windows.
As I studied Consumer Reports window-buying tips on the computer and Wim foraged in the fridge for a snack, an email from Luke arrived in my inbox. My heart skipped a beat as I read his message.
In my last email about light fixtures, I had inadvertently omitted the letter “c,” typing scones instead of sconces. Luke had just replied, Do you want jelly on your scones, and how do you take your tea?
In the previous couple of months, our emails had become less formal and more playful. Typos had become our own little in-joke. It was fun to flirt in a way that I hadn’t in a long time. It was a thrill to detect an interest aimed in both directions. The connection between us left me feeling giddy.
I was smiling, trying to think of a clever comeback, when Wim entered the room holding a red apple. I scrambled to turn off my email, then asked myself why. It’s just an innocent email, I reminded myself. But if I thought it might make Wim uncomfortable, did that make it wrong? I had to admit, I was getting emotional satisfaction from my relationship with Luke. I loved Wim, but our marriage had become so routine it was like a restaurant menu that never changed. I wasn’t looking to make a complete overhaul—just to spice things up a little.